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EVERY-DAY LIFE 



AND 



EVERY-DAY MORALS 



BY 



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GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY, 

AUTHOR OF "ALOHA: TRAVELS IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS}" 

"F. GRANT AND CO., OR, PARTNERSHIPS;" 

"TOM, A HOME STORY." 









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| dec i! wsy, 



BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1885. 






Copyright, 1SS4, 
By George Leonard Chaney. 



Unifcrrsttn JDrrss : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TO 

THE CHURCH OF OUR FATHER, 

AND ITS FRIENDS IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, 
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 



PREFACE, 



HE papers which make up this vol- 
ume were read last winter, on 
Sunday evenings, in the Church 
of Our Father in Atlanta, Georgia. 
They had their origin in a local agitation 
about some publicly exposed pictures, which 
were considered by some excellent people to 
be more injurious to the people's morals than 
helpful to the people's taste. The considera- 
tion of the relation of Art to Morals naturally 
led to the equally important subject of the 
influence of men's reading upon their moral 
standard ; then the " Moral Uses of a Good 
Trade" and "Business Morality" suggested 
themselves. "The Stage," "The Press," and 
" The Pulpit " followed as quickly as a flock 
of birds settles where one has alighted. 



vi PREFACE. 



In a word, these sermons — if they are 
sermons (many will doubt it) — preached 
themselves. I print them because I have 
been asked to do so by some who heard them. 
If the reader cannot approve their judgment, 
let him, if he can, copy their kindness. If he 
is led by reading this book to the wiser 
thoughts his own mind may give him, our 
purpose will be gained. Often it is only so 
that the preacher reconciles himself to the 
" foolishness of preaching." 



GEORGE LEONARD CHANEY. 



Atlanta, Georgia, 
Nov. 3, 1884. 



CONTENTS. 

Page 

I. Art and Morals 3 

II. . Juvenile Literature and Juvenile 

Morals 23 

III. Literature and Morals 55 

IV. Industry and Morals 85 

V. Business and Morals Ill 

VI. The Stage and Morals 131 

VII. The Press and Morals 161 

VIII. The Pulpit and Morals 199 



ART AND MOEALS. 



EVEKY-DAY LIFE 

AND 

EVERY-DAY MORALS. 



I. 

ART AND MORALS. 

And God saw everything that Re had made, and 
behold, it was very good. — Gen. i. 31. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
God. — Matt. v. 8. 

HAT we see depends on what we 
are. Take the Washington elm 
at Cambridge. The patriot and 
antiquarian love it for its his- 
toric associations ; the artist admires its 
beauty ; the naturalist sees in it a fine speci- 
men of vegetation ; the traveller takes it for 
his landmark ; the woodman thinks how 
many cords of wood it would make ; the 
butcher would like a section of its trunk for 
his meat-block ; the bird views it as a safe or 
unsafe place for her nest ; the cattle, on their 




ART AND MORALS. 



way to Brighton, love to linger, in the hot 
summer day, under its shadow ; the winds 
make it their onran ; the moss clings to its 
aged bark ; insects make their dying bed 
and grave of resurrection in its sheltering 
crevices ; the citizen points it out to the 
visiting stranger, — he is proud of its memo- 
ries. The poet sings his centennial ode under 
the branches where the hero first drew his 
sword in the defence of the liberties of his 
country. Half way between the former 
homes of Longfellow and Lowell, the one 
could see its branches against the morning 
sky, the other against the sunset ; they 
answered its birds with son^s more sweet 
than theirs ; they saw in the tree the prin- 
ciples for which it stood in Nature and in 
history. Meanwhile the busy crowd of un- 
thinking men went by the tree daily, and did 
not see it at all. 

Thus the same object may be many differ- 
ent things to many spectators. 

The heart of man is like a mirror. Let 
its surface be only a little out of level, or 
its substance broken by cracks or flaws or 



ART AND MORALS. 



scratches, and immediately its reflection will 
be distorted or broken. A swelling convex 
surface will make the most beautiful face 
monstrous. Contrariwise, a retreating con- 
cave surface will make the same face petty 
and ridiculous. Every defect in the glass 
shows in the image it gives back. A blotch on 
it becomes a blotch on the face, which submits 
itself to its false report. It is owing to such 
defects as these in the medium through which 
man looks upon the views and visions that 
appear to him, that he gets such varied and 
false ideas of the realities they represent. 
Given a pure, smooth surface of polished 
metal, and the reflection will be true ; but 
given such hearts as most of us have, to hold 
up to man and Nature or the heavenly sce- 
nery, and it happens, of necessity, that all 
these things suffer from our report of them. 
We do not see them as they are, but as yve 
are. 

It is the full appreciation of this defect in 
our apprehension and vision which makes us 
willing to accept the testimony of experts, or 
those more experienced than ourselves in one 



ART AND MORALS. 



or another department of life. For truth of 
art, we turn to the artist ; for truth of mor- 
als, to the moralist ; for business truth, to the 
honorable business man ; for law, to the law- 
yer; medicine, to the doctor; education, to 
the teacher ; and for spiritual truth, to the 
spiritual seer. It is this which makes us 
look gratefully to Jesus for the revelation of 
the Father. In his heart, as in a clear mirror, 
God's image may be seen. But even such 
reports suffer often from our misunderstand- 
ing ; so that we are brought at last to the 
hard but really helpful extremity of having 
to make our own hearts pure, clean, and sen- 
sitive, if we would get a clear image or a 
true knowledge of anything in its purity and 
truth. 

The promise to the pure in heart that they 
shall see God, is the largest promise ever 
made to man. The earlier faiths had said 
that no man could see God and live ; and the 
gospel had said : " No man hath seen God at 
any time. The only begotten Son who is in 
the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed 
Him." But the same lips pronounce this 



ART AND MORALS. 



benediction upon the pure in heart. As a 
child, looking into the still deep of a well 
and seeing his own face there, might sud- 
denly behold bending over him his father's or 
his mother's face, and know by that sign that 
he was not alone, so the pure in heart, look- 
ing into the depths of his own consciousness, 
shall see God. 

One example is worth pages of commen- 
tary. Let us seek one that is not worn 
threadbare. 

Late in the seventeenth century there lived 
near Amsterdam a Jewish youth, on whom 
the title and the office of rabbi were early 
bestowed. Born and bred a Jew, he could 
not wholly or immediately throw off his in- 
wrought habits of thought. Obedient to his 
teachers, he travelled the customary round 
of Scripture and commentary, Talmud and 
Cabala, until the very suggestions of the 
Bible itself, caught up by his expansive 
mind, caused him to feel the immediate pres- 
ence, in all places and in all things, of one 
greater than the temple or its book. He 
did not deny revelation, — the revelation 



8 ART AND MORALS. 

of the Bible, — but he believed it so fully 
that he acted upon it, and found the God 
everywhere, whose report only was in the 
Scriptures. 

For this he was deemed heretical by the 
Jewish church, and solemnly anathematized 
and excommunicated. For this he was de- 
clared atheist, — he who believed so much 
in God that he disbelieved in the reality of 
all else. No sect, Hebrew or Christian, had 
a place for him of whom Auerbach says, at 
the conclusion of his life : " No thinker, since 
Spinoza, has lived so much in the eternal as 
he did." 

" The God-intoxicated man " he has been 
called, because of the fulness and joy of his 
faith and life in God. His mortal life, which 
was cut off at only forty-four years, was a 
Sabbath of the Lord ; and when you get 
the secret of this intellectual and moral 
vision of God, which Spinoza possessed, you 
will find it in his mental candor and clean- 
ness of heart. " Only the purified are pure ; " 
and he was purified by the baptism of pov- 
erty, disappointment, and loneliness, until, 



ART AND MORALS. 9 

having suffered with patience the loss of all 
things, he was rewarded by the communion 
of the all in all. 

As I see Baruch Spinoza, Benedictus or 
blessed, as his Hebrew name signifies, earn- 
ing his daily bread as a polisher of optical 
glasses, I cannot shut my eyes to the perfect 
symbolism of his homely trade. As Auer- 
bach says, " The work is but unclean from 
one point of view ; while engaged in it the 
workman is covered with dirt and sand ; but 
its aim is the highest degree of purity and 
cleanliness." To make a lens without crack 
or flaw was the daily work and ambition 
of the devout artisan • and all the while his 
own eye, single to truth, was flooding his 
whole body with the light of the knowledge 
of the glory of God. The pure in heart 
saw God. And what is singular and in- 
structive, — this man saw evil in all its de- 
formity, and yet saw through it to the throne 
of God. 

" I forbear from evil, or strive to forbear 
from it," he said, " because it is in direct 
opposition to my special nature, and would 



10 ART AND MORALS. 

divide me from the love and knowledge of 
God, which is the highest good.' , 

An acute critic has pointed out the radical 
difference between the best morality of Greece 
or Rome and that of Christianity, by showing 
that the latter is touched by emotion and so 
elevated to religion. "Thus," he says, " Cicero 
comments : ' Hold off from sensuality, for if 
you have given yourself up to it, you will find 
yourself unable to think of anything else.' 
But Christ says : l Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God.' " The one is a 
prudential maxim ; the other is a quickening 
benediction. Spinoza's rule seems to share 
the prudence of the philosopher with the 
fervor of religion. He would avoid evil 
because it keeps him from the knowledge 
and love of God, which is the highest good. 

When one has caught the quickening im- 
pulse of Christianity, and turned with pure 
resolution unto God, then all other counsels 
and direction have their value to him. He 
sees, with Cicero, how wholly the thoughts 
of the mind and the imaginations of the heart 
are run away with, when a man gives him- 



ART AND MORALS. 11 

self up to sensuality in any of its forms ; how 
the haunting image pursues him wherever he 
goes, blurring the page he reads, so that he 
has to read it again and again before he can 
know its sense, diverting his mind as he 
travels from place to place, and blinding him 
to the suggestive incidents by the way, or 
defeating that preparedness which he might 
have secured for the business before him. He 
sees how little room there is in the crowded 
inn of his money-making, world-pleasing 
heart for the Son of God to be born ; and all 
the reasons for purity, as well as the instinctive 
love of it, come home with full force to him. 

There is a wise proverb that they who go 
to the Indies must carry the Indies with them. 
It is a popular way of saying that only the 
godlike can see God. 

I have dwelt thus far upon the principle 
that like sees like in everything it looks 
upon, because of its especial application to 
the questions sometimes raised between art 
and morals. If every picture or statue suffers 
a change in the passing of an eye, and be- 
comes one thing to one man and the very 



12 ART AND MORALS. 

opposite to another, how can any classifica- 
tion of art take place, or any line be drawn 
between the truly beautiful and the ugly, the 
moral and the shameless ? What is one man's 
" meat or drink " is another man's poison. 
To the pure all things are pure, and to the 
impure all things are impure. The moral of 
■which is that we should bend all our efforts 
towards making men as their Maker has been 
described, " of purer eyes than to behold 
evil." 

As to the natural relation of art to morals, 
I never hear the matter discussed without 
recalling the subject of one of our college 
themes, namely : " Whether the sense of 
beauty ever furthered the performance of a 
single act of duty." The very form of the 
question suggested a doubt; and when we 
recall the lives of people distinguished for 
artistic excellence, we certainly have to re- 
member that they have not always been as 
remarkable for purity. There is an element 
of fiction in all art. It is " make-believe " 
rather than " believe." The greatest actor 
is he who can act as if he were somebody 



ART AND MORALS. 13 

else — not himself. The greatest painter is 
he who paints a bunch of grapes so that the 
birds will peck at it, or a curtain so that one 
will try to draw it away. The better the 
cheat, the better the artist. Good novel- 
writing is skilful lying. There is an element 
of deception in most artistic work. 

Moreover, there is a certain absorption in 
art which, unless it is guarded against, makes 
a man selfish. He cannot bear to be dis- 
turbed. When the mood for work is on him 
his dearest friend is an enemy to him, and his 
wife and children aliens and strangers. For 
whatever reason, artists certainly do not pre- 
sent in their biographies very exemplary liv- 
ing, and some of them so exhaust their powers 
in acting that they have none left for doing. 
Their lives make lively reading, — Benvenuto 
Cellini's, for example ; and one is sure to 
notice how often their works surpass their 
virtues. Of course there are grand excep- 
tions. But with them the question may 
fairly be asked, whether their sense of beauty 
ever furthers the performance of a single act 
of duty. 



14 ART AND MORALS. 

And yet we must not ask of art a virtue 
which does not belong to it. 

Enough if it refines and rejoices us with 
its fine and versatile forms. Conduct is not 
all of life, although it is all-important. In 
that blissful recess, when the restraints of the 
school discipline are taken off, and our tastes 
and senses enjoy a free run out of doors, art 
is the joyful master of our revels and sets 
the red blood flowing in our arteries. We 
should not ask her to be as orderly and quiet 
as the school-room. She has a law and lib- 
erty of her own. And although purity be- 
longs alike to work and play, there is a 
joyful abandon in the latter which will al- 
ways seem like levity to the earnest moralist. 
A modern writer on Culture and Anarchy 
declares that Puritanism in England shut the 
door and turned the key on man, and im- 
prisoned him for two or three centuries, 
away from grace and art and beauty. And 
Christianity has been reproached from the 
beginning because of its austerity and in- 
difference to art. 

It is true that the emphasis of Christianity, 



ART AND MORALS. 15 

like its predecessor, Judaism, has been given 
to morals and conduct. But it is not true 
that it has antagonized art. Even in its 
day of persecution, when it was driven to 
make its abode with the dead in caves and 
dens of the earth, it had its dear and sacred 
symbolism. The catacombs of Rome are filled 
with this native and unquenchable love of 
the beauty that has a beautiful meaning in it. 
The apolo'gist of Christian art and symbol- 
ism, Tyrwhitt, declares that the fathers had 
something more important to do in these early 
days than to cultivate the fine arts. Nor had 
they, as he shows, much reason to admire or 
imitate the graces of that civilization which 
maimed and crucified them. But the germ 
of that sacred love of the beauty that has a 
beautiful meaning was always in Christianity. 
It filled the catacombs w T ith hopeful imagery, 
more hopeful than the later theology was. For 
among those images there is one of the Good 
Shepherd, bearing upon his shoulder, not a 
favored lamb, but a lost and despised kid. If 
later Christian art has depicted with marvel- 
lous power the horrors of the last judgment, 



16 ART AND MORALS. 

it has also filled Christendom with the images 
of hope and mercy. To-day the picture con- 
fessed to be the most beautiful in the world 
is the Sistine Madonna. In such art Christi- 
anity defends herself from the imputation of 
indifference or incompetence in the realm of 
taste and beauty. 

The beauty that has a beautiful meaning, — 
that has an honored place in Christian nur- 
ture. The art that tells a noble story so that 
the hearer feels all its strength and power, — 
that will always be found among the hand- 
maids of religion and the friends of morals. 
Yes, the sense of beauty is itself a moral aid. 
For in spite of the frequently ill-regulated 
lives of artists, I believe that the love of true 
beauty is an ally of conscience, working for 
and not against its claims. Nay, I should 
put the aesthetic taste high among the sav- 
ing powers ; in union with the active moral 
powers of man, an inspiration and motive, 
for it gives refinement to all our workings ; 
it gives relief from drudgery to all our toil. 
And here, before principles of right are fully 
formed in us, it is often a safeguard from evil 



ART AND MORALS. 17 

companionship and the grosser sins. In the 
hazardous interim between boyhood and man- 
hood we are more indebted to good taste than 
good principles for our escape from bad com- 
pany. The vulgar fellows either do or do not 
suit us, according to our taste. It is more 
that than abhorrence of their sins, I think, 
which saves us from their intimacy. At 
least, as I read the past, I find frequent 
occasion to be thankful for influences which 
quickened and pruned the sense of beauty 
and the desire for it, in all its true forms. 
I believe that in most people tastes grow 
earlier than principles ; and as they are well 
or ill formed, intimacies are made which, more 
than anything else, determine the character 
of our after-lives. 

Guard well, therefore, your children's tastes. 
Feed them early with the best scenery, the 
best pictures, the best company, and the best 
art, which is really nature. Let them study 
nature, for there they will find ever the per- 
fection of art, that is, of science at work, with 
equal care for use and beauty. All the ways 
of nature are artistic. The inspired poet of 



18 ART AND MORALS, 

the creation, from whose song we took a por- 
tion of our text, represents the Creator as 
viewing the world after each stage of its 
growth, and seeing that " it was good." It 
pleased Him. It was well done. And ever 
since that day, as the uncovered geologic 
ages attest, and as all the fields are telling 
in these latest creations, there has been the 
same Almighty hand at work upon the earth, 
blending use and beauty in every created 
thing. Even in their decay the works of God 
put on new beauty ; while in the freshness of 
the living creation beauty so contends with 
use that it is hard to pluck for eating what 
nature has made so good for seeing. 

Go where you will, by rail or carriage 
through the country, or explore on foot the 
deep woods, everywhere you are met by the 
amazing tokens of an Almighty artist-hand 
at work beyond all the requirements of mere 
utility, seemingly for beauty's sake alone. At 
least each useful shrub or tree and every ani- 
mal is formed as admirably for looks as for 
service ; and in every combination, as well as 
in single creations, Nature presents always a 



ART AND MORALS. 19 

harmony which gives the rule to taste. Thus 
all her working is fine art; and the infinite 
Father, who worketh hitherto, follows in His 
own working the way He has given us the 
instinctive desire and the inspired power to 
pursue. When he, whose life and teachings 
are our way to everlasting life, taught man to 
strive to be perfect as the Father in heaven 
is perfect, did he not mean that even as the 
Almighty in His infinite variety of works did 
each thing perfectly, so man in his sphere 
should strive to do the things given him to 
do, each perfectly in its way? Everything 
well done is beautiful. 

Thus will remain the real edifice of the 
faithful workman. And even as we saw the 
Jewish polisher of glass, Spinoza, the devout- 
est philosopher of modern times, amidst the 
dirt and clutter of his shop making a perfect 
lens with which to see the work of God, and 
all the while his own spiritual vision was 
growing purer and purer with the perfect- 
ing of his work, until at last he saw not the 
work of God, but God Himself, the only re- 
ality, the all in all ; so we, if we will live and 



20 ART AND MORALS. 

love and labor, and do all things sincerely, 
purely, and well, shall find ourselves growing 
in the knowledge of that beauty which has a 
beautiful meaning, and in the recognition of 
which the true artist finds his acceptable 
reward. 



II. 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND 
JUVENILE MORALS. 



II. 



JUVENILE LITEEATUEE AND JUVENILE 
MOEALS. 

And I went to the angel and said unto him, Give me the 
little book. And he said unto me, Take it and eat 
it up ; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall 
be in thy mouth sweet as honey. — Eev. x. 9. 

F we do not know the book referred 
to in this verse, we know others like 
it. At least, we know of books that 
have the same effect, — books that 
please the tongue and ruin the digestion. 
And very many of them are little books. A 
grain of poison is often more deadly than a 
pound. Little books for little folks, and their 
effect upon the moral character of their sus- 
ceptible reader, or juvenile literature and 
juvenile morals, is the subject we would 
consider. 

But before we do anything else, let us 




24 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

define what we mean by literature. What 
definitely is literature ? Not all possible 
learning, surely. That would be too broad 
a theme to handle at all. The name of 
literature, as I would use it, applies only to 
knowledge attractively put. Science, history, 
biography, travel, even fiction and poetry, 
are or are not a part of literature, accord- 
ing as they are or are not attractively put. 
There must be some special felicity of state- 
ment to make a writing or address literary. 
The book must he " sweet in the mouth." 
It is not literature without this special grace. 
Thus, when I read in my chemistry that 
hydrogen and oxygen unite to form water, 
that is science. But when I hear Tyndall, 
as I once heard him in a lecture, put the 
same truth in this ardent fashion, — hydrogen 
and oxygen kiss each other, — then I recog- 
nize the beginning of literature. And any- 
body who is at all familiar with the writings of 
Tyndall and Huxley and Proctor, and the best 
of modern scientific lecturers, feels the charm 
and poetry of their style as well as the value 
and significance of their scientific truths. The 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 25 

same illustration of literature may be found 
in every department of learning. The story 
of the French Revolution, as told in the school 
history, is not literature. But let Carlyle or 
Dickens, in his " Tale of Two Cities/' speak 
the word, and the dead past lives again like 
a present reality. This is literature. The 
multiplication-table is not literature. But 
a Ten Times One is Ten," as Mr. Hale has 
told it in his lively rendering of the great 
principle of the geometrical progression of 
goodness — this is vital literature. Science 
is truth. Literature is truth and grace. 

Dean Stanley is reported to have said that 
he read Hawthorne's " Marble Faun " first to 
follow the story ; then he read it again to en- 
joy its exquisite English ; and then he read 
it a third time because he wished to. In this 
anecdote, whether exactly reported or not, 
one sees the secret of literature. It is that 
clothing or presentation of truth which gives 
peculiar pleasure to the hearer of it. After 
reading it, for one or another motive, you 
turn to it and wish to read it again out of 
your delight in its presentation. 



26 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

But we have pledged ourselves to speak 
not of literature at large, but of that special 
department of it, — books for children. Be- 
lieving that the literary element in learning 
is especially suited to promote pleasurable 
emotion in its pursuit, and is therefore just 
the element to be treasured and cultivated 
in sound and vital education, we are bound 
to study literature and use its best ways and 
means in the nurture of the children. I do 
not say that the world can be wholly emanci- 
pated from drudgery, but some progress in 
that direction can be made, and one of the 
aids to this progress will be found in the liter- 
ary treatment of many subjects that now get 
before the children only in the driest and 
most mechanical shape. 

There is a law in optics, which says that 
when you would see a very distant star, you 
must look a little to one side of it. The star 
is positively best seen by the eye that is not 
looking directly at it. And the same princi- 
ple holds good in education. The mind is 
shy ; it shuns observation ; it will carry off 
its food when it thinks nobody is looking. 



. JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 27 

The "truth embodied in a tale/' says Ten- 
nyson, "will enter in at lowly doors." All 
this accommodation of the truth to the whim 
or natural constitution of the mind is a part 
of the art of the educator of children; and he 
has in this the example and sanction of the 
spirit of truth itself, which teaches principles 
by means of persons, and makes the actual 
hint its pure ideal. 

We shall certainly agree in this : the mind, 
to be instructed, must be interested. One 
might as well attempt to seal a letter with 
cold wax, as fix a truth in a dull and inat- 
tentive head. The latest and best instance of 
a saving knowledge of this primary fact in 
education, came to me in a Georgia city. I 
was visiting a school with the superintendent, 
and, as we came away from it, I could not 
help expressing my satisfaction with the dis- 
cipline, or, better than that, the entente cordiale 
which evidently existed between the teacher 
and her scholars. " And yet," said my com- 
panion, " that very teacher came to me after 
a few weeks' trial at the beginning of her 
course, and said that she could not teach. 



28 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

She could not keep or even get the attention 
of her scholars." This wise man did not re- 
proach or discourage her. He agreed with 
her that she must begin by exciting her 
pupils' interest. But how ? " Go and teach 
them the last jig you learned." " Oh ! I can 
amuse them, if that is the thing." " The 
thing is first to interest them. Take your 
own way, but interest them." She began 
with a jig, and when I was there she had 
one of the best schools in Macon. That jig 
was literature at work in education. I wish 
there were more of it in our schools. 

There is no lack of it, however, in our 
libraries. It has been estimated that not 
less that a thousand books a year for chil- 
dren alone are published in the English 
tongue. In this great sea of variously com- 
pounded fact and fiction, the youth finds 
abundance of leeway for his voyaging im- 
agination. And he takes it too. I grudge 
the live and greedy interest with which our 
boys and girls turn from their studies and 
leap into the fascinating pages of the story- 
book. Such absorbing attention given to any 



JUVENILE LITER A TURE AND MORALS. 29 

of the subjects we wish them to master would 
make teaching a delight and learning a pas- 
time. I shall never feel that we have mas- 
tered the art of teaching until something of 
the same eagerness and attention is secured 
for the work of the school. If it ever comes, 
it will come by the adoption of the literary 
and persuasive, rather than the dogmatic and 
authoritative method. 

More and more, the best literature is find- 
ing its way into our system of education. It is 
used for continuous reading and study. Many 
schools are provided with lending and consult- 
ing libraries. And with the rapid multiplica- 
tion of free libraries in centres of population, 
a new agency, not inferior to the public school 
system itself, and closely allied to it, is com- 
ing into use. The librarians and teachers of 
the country, co-operating for the sound and 
vital development of the mind, will yet bring 
it to pass. The library will quicken the school, 
and the school will discipline the library. In- 
stead of flying to the library from the school 
as a refuge and consolation for its dull task- 
work, the youth will go there to feast on what 



30 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

the school lias given him the taste for. Eager 
to know more of what the school and the 
home have only had time to teach him a 
little, he runs to the library to gratify his 
curiosity. He ought to find there a guide 
and friend, who will show him where to look 
for what he needs ; and such a guide ought 
to receive the liveliest sympathy and closest 
alliance of all parents and teachers. 

It has been my privilege within the week 
to visit with the librarian the most fre- 
quented alcoves of the Young Men's Library 
of this city. It is needless to say that these 
contain the shelves of fiction. Nowhere else 
has it been found necessary so frequently to 
rebind or to supply duplicate copies. There 
they stand, the people's favorite books, pay- 
ing dearly for their popularity, if books take 
any pleasure in keeping themselves whole 
and neat. Nothing would be easier or com- 
moner than to condemn the whole collection, 
without hearing what its books had to say 
for themselves or discriminating between one 
book and another. But we have already said 
too much on behalf of literature, that is, 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 31 

knowledge made attractive by its becoming 
dress, to make such a sweeping judgment. 
Some of the truest literature, perhaps the most 
distinctive literature of our age, has been run 
into the mould of fiction. The man would 
show himself ignorant and ill-natured who re- 
fused to see and allow this. It is very much 
to the credit of those who make use of this 
library that the best fiction is much read. 
Even in the juvenile department the best is 
never neglected. The old standards, especially 
when they come out in new and modern dress, 
hold their own, and the best of contempo- 
raneous writings for children are heartily ap- 
preciated. On the whole, the novel-reading 
by these children is not so bad as we feared ; 
not so bad as it might be. At least the better 
writers are not ignored, although it is to be 
feared the poorer ones are preferred. 

But why are the poorer books preferred ? 
This is the question we ought to be con- 
sidering. To the man who believes that 
child-nature is in itself corrupt, the answer 
is ready. But he who called the little 
children unto him and commended their 



32 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

innocence, will have us seek some other ex- 
planation of the children's choice. In order 
to get at this explanation, let us see what 
that choice is. The juvenile books that are 
pre-eminently the worse for wear in the 
Young Men's Library are the stories written 
by Oliver Optic, Horatio Alger, and Cap- 
tain Mayne Eeid. We elders, reading these 
books, find some things to deprecate in many 
of them. But the boys like them, and like 
them unreservedly. I have never heard an 
adverse criticism from a boy upon any of 
these stories. The name of either of these 
authors upon a book is reason enough with 
a boy for reading it. What is their charm ? 
Let us seek for it and see if it cannot be 
captured and combined with better matter. 
Let us see if some of it cannot be imported 
into school and church and home life, and 
thus made a part of vital education. 

It is easy to see where Mr. William T. 
Adams (Oliver Optic) gets his hold upon the 
youthful heart. If there is anything boys 
love, it is vacation and motion. Mr. Adams's 
heroes are always on the move and always on 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 33 

a vacation. One feels after reading his restless 
books as if he must take the first opportunity 
to run away. Take, for example, his Great 
Western Series, in which the reader is whisked 
from one end of the Union to another, now 
on the Great Lakes and now in the Gulf of 
Mexico, now on the Hudson and now on the 
Mississippi, and everywhere on the track of 
a hero who is always in imminent peril of his 
life. If one should judge from these books, 
yachting would seem to be the main business 
in life ; existence one long outing. A little 
lad on the Hudson being asked by his teacher 
at school how to go from Albany to Chicago, 
all the way by water, suddenly resolves to 
make the trip in a yacht which his father has 
given him. He runs off with the boat, is 
discovered, brought back, and, notwithstand- 
ing his youth and proved incapacity for 
sailing, his astonishing father commends his 
enterprise and advises him to put it through. 
After this the reader is prepared to be sur- 
prised at nothing, but he has miscalculated 
the resources of his author. Other and more 
startling adventures await him. Impending 



34 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

murder, rank conspiracy, and prevailing mys- 
tery mingle with the elements to keep up 
the excitement ; and in the end — if there 
ever comes an end to these successive se- 
rials — villany is thwarted and innocence 
triumphant. 

These books, as I said, are full of motion 
and vacation, and hence charming to the 
boys who read them. As I recall the genial, 
quiet little author, his beaming face and bright 
black eyes, his modest, unoffending manners 
and address, I can with difficulty realize that 
he wrote these tremendous stories. He was 
a fellow-member with me of the school board 
of Boston, and a very active and useful man 
in that position. I remember his coming to 
my desk one evening at a school committee 
meeting and giving me his experience in 
story-writing for boys. He began, he said, 
by writing quiet, home stories for children ; 
but the necessities of voluminous authorship, 
and the discovery of the children's endless 
capacity for motion, mystery, and adventure 
had run away with him. I knew him also as 
a faithful and conscientious Sunday-school 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 35 

superintendent of one of the oldest and best 
of our churches, the First Parish Church in 
Dorchester. I have no more doubt of the 
good intention of his books than I have of 
the improbability of their incidents, the in- 
different quality of their literary workman- 
ship, and the restless disposition they excite 
in the children who read them. 

Of Horatio Alger I can also speak from 
personal recollection. I remember the day 
when I was called upon to preach his ordina- 
tion sermon in the town of Brewster, Massa- 
chusetts. A little, fair, innocent-looking man, 
with tender eyes and the complexion of a 
girl, as far removed, one would say, from 
knowledge or interest in the street boys of 
New York as the young moon. His person- 
ality then, like his slender frame, was only 
faintly outlined. I suspected him of poetry, 
and predicted for him a long and saintly 
country pastorate like that of George Her- 
bert, — a prediction which showed that I was 
no prophet. It has all been the very reverse 
of my anticipation. He left the ministry 
before three years had passed, and took up 



36 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

juvenile literature. Nice readers complain of 
his books that they are vulgar and vulgar- 
izing. They say that their effect upon boys 
is to make them pert and smart. But 
here again there must be some merit in 
books that attract so many boyish read- 
ers. They are not read for their faults, but 
for their merits. What are they ? It seems 
to me that they are real and conspicuous. 
These stories of the street Arabs of New 
York, their fortunes and misfortunes, their 
exposures, sufferings, and trials, their struggle 
for life, and the survival and ultimate suc- 
cess of the fittest and most enterprising 
of them, have something in them which 
appeals to the sense of reality in boys. The 
characters may not be exemplary. They 
are often far from that ; but they seem real. 
If 3'ou hit them, you know that they would 
hit back. They have fir more nature in 
them than the better-behaved boys of better- 
approved books. If they are rough, pert, 
rowdy, and dare-devil, that is what such 
bo}\s really are. The boy-reader knows this, 
and he likes the truth of the picture whether 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 37 

he likes the picture or not. I think he is 
quite right in this preference of reality to 
make-believe. And although the company 
offered in Mr. Alger's books is neither polite 
nor refined, and therefore not the best com- 
pany, it has the merit of being real. I can 
see also how a limited acquaintance with the 
rough and hard life of the city gamin may be 
of advantage to a lad. It reveals to him the 
common humanity of the lowest and the 
highest. Indeed, it is not unusual to find 
among these " lost and perishing classes," as 
they are called, the tenderest feeling. When 
Mr. McCabe, the remarkable English delinea- 
tor of character, — a man who combined a 
full theatrical company in himself, and actu- 
ally played a long connected play alone, he 
taking all the parts, — was in New York, 
he fell into a discussion with a friend as to 
the qualities of the rougher and ruder classes 
of a great city. He declared that he could 
touch their hearts quicker than those of the 
higher classes; and to put his statement to 
the proof, he donned the rags of a beggar, 
and simulating with his perfect art the voice 



38 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

and air of a man in poverty and distress, he 
went upon the street and appealed to rich 
and poor. The gentlemen went by on the 
other side. The newsboys and boot-blacks 
took up a collection for him. 

I tell the story only to show that tales of 
street-boys are not of necessity demoralizing. 
And it is due Mr. Alger and his youthful ad- 
mirers to say that their popular books are 
often relieved, in spite of their rude and 
rough speech, by touches of real nobility. 
At any rate, the characters generally have a 
likeness to life in them, and that alone is no 
mean merit, especially in a boy's eyes. He 
can forgive anything more easily than un- 
reality or insincerity ; and half the books 
written for children with a moral or religious 
purpose are as unreal as ghosts. Boys are 
nature's detectives of unreality. If I knew 
myself to be a humbug, I would beware 
of boys. 

I think this is one reason for the enthu- 
siastic love of Captain Mayne Reid and his 
books which most lads have. To be sure, 
the out-of-door life in these books, their 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 39 

thrilling adventure, their hair-breadth escapes, 
their agonized situations, out of which heroes 
and heroines escape with miraculous agility, 
would be enough to captivate the whole race 
of boys ; but, with all this, there is a dash of 
frank Irish feeling which redeems much of 
the tragedy and melodrama. In his ear- 
lier works for children, such as the " Boy 
Hunters " and the u Young Voyagers," there 
is a painstaking attempt to instruct as well as 
delight the youthful reader. On every page 
real information is given. It is natural his- 
tory teaching by adventure. But the passion 
for romance is in the warm Irish heart, and 
before long his books run away from nature 
in their love of man and ivoman. It cannot 
be objected that "Ran away to Sea" is a 
book calculated to encourage children to re- 
peat that perilous experiment. Far greater 
crimes than that could hardly be visited by 
swifter or more awful punishment. Indeed, 
the miseries and perils of that unhappy run- 
away are quite enough to sicken the boldest 
of youthful adventurers. Tortured by his 
shipmates, persecuted by a brutal captain, 



40 JUVENILE LITERATURE AXD MORALS. 

sold into slavery, rescued from that only to 
fall into greater peril from a crocodile, saved 
from this only to find himself in mid-ocean 
dying of thirst, and then on a burning ship 
with a cargo of living beings between decks 
whom no power can save, again selected for 
death to feed his starving companions upon 
a raft, and last of all saved to write this book, 
— all this on one short voyage from America 
to Africa and back ! I know not what powers 
of endurance and obduracy of sympathy chil- 
dren's hearts may have, but I find myself 
quite broken clown after such a recital. 

For the last ten days I have been reading 
children's books, and I can liken the result 
to nothing but my imagination of the after- 
effects of intoxication. Is it possible that 
tender, shrinking youthful hearts, naturally 
believing hearts, to whom fiction is, for the 
time being, a reality, are being tortured alive 
over these imaginary perils and hair-breadth 
escapes, and the children still live ? 

After reading " Osceola" and " The Fla^ of 
Distress," by Mayne Reid, I feel like taking 
back my praise of him. How can the same 



. JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 41 

hand write the " Boy Voyageurs " and snch 
crude, mawkish, love and blood and thunder 
stories as these ? The misery of it all lies 
in the magic of an author's name when it is 
once associated with a lively and entertaining 
book. Forthwith the young reader takes 
another and another, believing, hoping, and 
surely expecting that all will be equally good. 
Far from it. I think it may safely be taken 
as a rule that only really great writers survive 
a great reputation ; that is, only great writ- 
ers do as good work after they become famous 
as before. The second-rate writers, and they 
are in the majority, seldom equal, in their 
after efforts, the book that made their name. 
Men presume so much, and usually, for their 
generation, so safely upon their reputation, 
that they make it do service in place of in- 
creasing excellence. This accounts in part for 
the growing inferiority of those who write too 
long and too much for children. It accounts 
for Oliver Optic's and Mayne Reid's degener- 
ation. The latter's story of " Osceola," or 
" The Flag of Distress," for example, is such 
stuff as nightmares are made of. Love, 



42 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

slavery, alligators, Indians, pistols, shot-guns, 
knives, fire, murder, scalps, tortures, snakes, a 
mad squaw, cheating, stealing, war, duelling, 
orang-outangs, gambling, shipwreck, sharks, 
and if there be anything else known or im- 
aginable that can harrow up the blood, let 
that be thrown in, and you will have the ma- 
terial for these stories. Let them be told in 
true melodramatic style, with the subject 
after the verb — "Had I" for "I had," and 
" Whither goest thou ? " for " Where are you 
going?" and " Ha ! perhaps it is too late," or 
66 1 bethought me of a flowery vale," this in 
a moment of extreme peril, and you have 
"Osceola; or, The Seminole Chief." When 
the plot can wait long enough for a moral 
lesson to be instilled, it is given in this shape : 
" In America, moral courage, though much be- 
praised, does not find ready credence. A re- 
fusal to meet a man who may challenge you 
is not thus explained. It is called backing 
out, showing the white feather ; and he who 
does this need look no more upon his ladye 
love ; she would flog him with her garters." 
On the titlepage of a copy of " The Flag 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 43 

of Distress " in the library, I find written in 
pencil this estimate of the book, — " A pretty 
good tale, but rather bloody-minded." 

These, then, are the books our boys are read- 
ing- with such gusto and approval. And I have 
said enough on their behalf to relieve me of 
all just suspicion of prejudice against them. 
Some of them have the great merit of reality 
in the lives and characters they draw, notably 
Mr. Alger's. Some have motion and vacation, 
like Mr. Adams's, and boys love both. Some 
have adventure, out-of-door life, and a dash of 
danger in them, like Mayne Reid's, and there 
is no fault in that. We do not wish our boys 
to be life-long stay-at-homes, with no spirit of 
enterprise or habits of endurance. Indeed, as 
I have suggested, we should do well to steal 
these elements of interest from the popular 
story-tellers, — motion, outing, adventure, 
reality, — and make them a part of our 
school and home training ; or, if they are 
already there, make more and better of 
them than we have ever done before. 

But in juvenile literature there is vastly 
too much of these elements and these men, — 



44 JUVENILE LITERATURE-AND MORALS. 

too many of their books. They run thin, and 
run out or run into sensation, untruthfulness, 
and an embarrassment of agony before they 
get through. And thus the author who be- 
gins by winning a genuine and deserved 
popularity with youth, often ends by de- 
serving to lose it wholly. The peril lies in 
his retaining the child's favor after he has 
ceased to merit it; the author's name cover- 
ing and condoning the faults of which his 
later writings are guilty. 

Happily the developing mind, especially if 
it is well trained and favored with good so- 
ciety, outgrows its old favorites and leaves 
them behind, for better company. Already. 
in a better and simpler class of books, the 
strain of these boyish tragedies finds the re- 
lief of change. The home and school stories 
of Louisa Alcott and Mrs. Diaz and Miss Eliza- 
beth Clark, of Mrs. Molesworth and Juliana 
Ewing, of Thomas Hughes and George Mac- 
Donald, of Mrs. Whitney and Miss Yonge, and 
the authors that fed our own boyhood with 
pure adventure and wholesome recreation, — 
Abbott, Defoe, Marryat, Mary Ilowitt, and Miss 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 45 

Edgeworth, — still live and gather delighted 
readers to their pages. Genuine books of 
travel, as interesting as novels, — Sir Samuel 
Baker's, Livingstone's, Du Chaillu's, Stanley's, 
Bayard Taylor's, Parkman's, Hayes's, Hall's, 
and Kane's, have been written. Histories for 
the young have been prepared by Dickens, 
Mrs. Charles, Miss Yonge, Freeman, Green, 
Hughes, Lanier, Coffin, Eggleston, and Hig- 
ginson. And science itself, once the peculiar 
property of age and learning, is coming down 
to the youngest apprehension in books adapted 
to the child. 

The problem is, how to get these books, 
and such as these, read by youth, in place of 
the others, or in healthful proportion to the 
others. I believe very much can be done in 
this direction by parents and teachers. Not 
always by direct advice or injunction, for 
youth cannot be advised or driven into pro- 
fitable reading. They must be led to it and 
allowed to think they have been their own 
leaders. A good book, bearing upon some 
subject in which a child has expressed an in- 
terest, skilfully dropped in his way, without 



46 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

any advice at all, will often accomplish the 
purpose in view. Take the child where you 
find him, and work up from that point, If he 
is caught in the toils of Indian tradition, lead 
him by degrees from Cooper to Parkman and 
Catlin, and help him to know Indian character 
and life as it is. If his heart goes voyaging, 
go with him in such books as Darwin's " Voy- 
age in the Beagle," or Mrs. Brassey's "Sun- 
beam," or Dana's " Two Years Before the 
Mast." If his imagination and fancy seek 
indulgence, give him the best of fairy tales 
and fables : Hans Andersen's and Grimm's, 
the "Arabian Nights," "^Esop," and "Uncle 
Remus." 

With excellent books already written on 
every subject that can interest a child's mind, 
there should be no hindrance to the satisfac- 
tion of that interest. Teachers and parents 
have it for their vocation to discover what the 
children really care to know, and beginning 
with that, and proceeding from that, step by 
step, I believe all the departments of knowl- 
edge usually admitted into a general and lib- 
eral curriculum of study, would in time be 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 47 

reached, and reached probably in the order 
best adapted to the individual child's needs 
and nature. It is not enough that we teach 
the children to read ; we must teach them 
what to read, and keep a supply of such 
reading at hand. 

In view of the hazards to which reading 
youth are exposed in these days of enor- 
mous and indiscriminate printing, it seems 
sometimes a doubtful advantage to know 
how to read. I know it is heresy to sug- 
gest to a country resting its whole weight 
upon the church and the school, that it 
could stand for a moment without this latter 
support. It could not. The school and the 
church are the twin pillars of the republic. 
But the school must teach something more 
than reading, even as the church must teach 
something more than doctrines. The one 
must lead us to the best reading, and the 
other to the best living. Failing this, both 
fail, and the republic with them. 

I have spoken thus far as if the only peril 
to the reading child were to be found in his 
injudicious use of such books as may be found 



48 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

in our leading libraries. But the great ma- 
jority of children in cities not provided with 
free libraries share neither the privileges nor 
the perils of such places. In the absence of 
a public library, they are obliged to depend 
for their reading upon the scanty supplies of 
their own homes and their neighbors'. Where, 
then, shall they turn for their reading ? In 
the answer to that question lies the secret of 
no little of the wreck and misery which, in 
spite of all the schools can do, — nay, it is 
cruel to think, partly in consequence of what 
the schools have done, — have come upon our 
young people. Minds enfeebled, imaginations 
fouled, bodies wrecked, powers defeated, lives 
shortened and lost ! — I fear this must be a 
part of the true report of our school and 
church and home-keeping to-day. For the 
youth who can read will read, and if we neg- 
lect to give good reading, he will take what 
he can get. And he can get easiest what is 
cheapest. And what is cheapest is (or was 
until this new era of the best in a cheap 
form) the dime novel and the sensational 
paper. Worse than that, — with an ingenuity 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 49 

and refinement of evil which suggest not 
one but many personal devils, — there are 
creatures in human form who actually make 
and sell immoral books and papers, and can- 
vass the whole country, making use, when 
they can obtain them, of the school -lists of 
our towns and cities, in order to circulate 
their lying and ruinous teachings. Is it any 
wonder that, for the moment, I wished our 
children could not read, rather than have 
them exposed to such a peril as that ? It is 
not imaginary. It is not by any means sup- 
pressed, although earnest and active men are 
fighting it with skill and with local and tem- 
porary success. But no outward laws or 
guardianship can save our children. Their 
defence must be in themselves ; in minds so 
trained, in hearts so nurtured, in imaginations 
so filled with sweet and uplifting images, in 
tastes so pure and true, and principles so 
fixed and just, that these temptations of evil 
shall get behind them and slink out of sight. 
And for this there must be not alone the 
teaching and nurture of the school and the 
church, but the free and generous supply, for 



50 JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

all her citizens, of true, vigorous, bracing, and 
elevating books. 

What are we thinking of, when we open 
schools and teach reading to eighty-three 
thousand three hundred and one colored boys 
and girls in the State of Georgia, and then leave 
them to such reading as may come in their 
way in the cheap daily and weekly papers or 
periodicals, none of them too good, and some 
of them too bad to be described ? We ought 
to expect new crimes, and in increasing num- 
bers, if we confer new powers without supply- 
ing them with appropriate means for their 
occupation and guidance. You cannot give 
powers to a man and deny him scope for 
their exercise or means for their use. Power 
is its own temptation. There ought to be 
free libraries and reading-rooms in all centres 
of population for the graduates of our colored 
schools. Better leave them in ignorance than 
leave them able to read, and face to nice with 
print that will only make them wise unto 
damnation. I hope the time is coming, yea, 
is already at hand, when all our youth will 
have free access to the character-making 



JUVENILE LITERATURE AND MORALS. 51 

books of English literature. In this work of 
moral invigoration by means of good books, 
especially in the nurture of the young, the 
church has an immediate call to be up and 
doing. With her sisters, the school and the 
home, she will yet fulfil the prophetic prom- 
ise : " And all thy children shall be taught of 
the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy 
children." 



III. 

LITERATURE AND MORALS. 




III. 

LITEEATUEE AKD MOEALS. 

Oh, that mine adversary had written a booh. — Job 
xxxi. 35. 

ffVEN then, in the most formidable 
|. shape in which a charge could 
come, Job meant that he would 
meet it. He would bind it as a 
crown upon his forehead, so sure was he of 
his integrity. 

I quote the passage only for its striking 
recognition of the power of a book, — the 
spell of literature. 

If, as we have said, science is truth, and 
literature is truth and grace, that is, knowl- 
edge made attractive by the beauty of its 
rendering; or if, to state the same thought 
differently, literature is art wedded to learn- 
ing ; and if art is the service of beauty, 



56 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

especially of the beauty which has a beautiful 
meaning, then good literature may always 
be distinguished by these two traits, — it is 
truthful and it is beautiful. It is therefore 
perfectly compatible with good morals and 
even helpful to them, although not of neces- 
sity aimed at a moral end. 

It is enough for the purposes of art if the 
book, the play, or the picture delights the 
sense of beauty. On its art side, therefore, 
literature only needs to gratify the instinct 
for beauty. But on the other hand, it must 
needs have truth, either of reality or proba- 
bility, or it falls short of good literature. 
Whatever meets both these requirements is 
good literature. Whatever meets either alone 
is art or science, according as it satisfies the 
love of beauty or the love of truth. Litera- 
ture is the daughter of science and art. 

It may be objected to our definitions that 
they are limited and arbitrary ; that what 
I call art is really what is known as fine art, 
and what I call literature is really belles- 
lettres. I accept the criticism, but do not 
count it an objection. At another time and 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 57 

in another connection, we may examine the 
relation of industrial art to morals, and of 
pure science to ethics. But nothing is really 
lost, and much is gained, by taking the terms 
literature and art in the narrower sense of 
belles-lettres and fine art, which is, indeed, 
their most popular and common sense. 

But man is something more than an artist 
and something more than a scientist. He is 
also a moralist. He is this pre-eminently. 
His nature touches its highest note in this. 
He therefore has a right to ask, and, more 
than that, he is in duty bound to ask, what 
effect any particular work of art or litera- 
ture may have upon character and life. Thus 
he criticises art and literature from a moral 
and practical stand-point ; and he has a right 
to do so, if he will only bear in mind that 
there is a real distinction in kind between 
a moral judgment and a literary or artistic 
judgment. He may justly object to certain 
books, pictures, and statues as a moralist, 
which as an artist or literary critic he would 
be compelled to admire. 

With this distinction clearly in mind, we 



58 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

are prepared to make our excursion into the 
wide realm of literature. Happily one por- 
tion of it we have already surveyed. Chil- 
dren's books, with their moral equivalents, 
have been already judged. The exact sci- 
ences are also out of the question, consisting 
as they do of truth exclusive of beauty. But 
enough is left, in poetry, fiction, history, 
travel, philosophy, and religion, to summon 
all our powers of attention and discrimina- 
tion. It is understood, however, that we are 
going as moralists, not as artists, up and down 
this World's Fair of literature, and also that 
nobody expects to carry off from such a 
massive spectacle anything more than a gen- 
eral impression of the dizzy scene, with here 
and there some well-defined book or name 
associated with some moral principle which, 
once fixed and illumined by an example, is 
capable of very wide application. 

Men fly to literature for diversion, enjoy- 
ment, instruction happily put, unconscious 
schooling, and education without compulsion. 
It is live learning ; truth with the glow of 
life in it. It does not, like the grocer, offer 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 59 

us dried fruits or meats in which everything 
is preserved but their native flavor, or mere 
flesh and bones, at their best, like the butcher. 
It keeps nothing but live stock, which frisks 
and goes through its paces with all the ease 
and grace in life. Its creatures are well-bred 
without losing their natural spirit, broken 
in without being broken down, tamed but 
not dulled, their culture the furtherance of 
their nature, not its mortification and denial. 
There is naturalness and simplicity in true 
literature, not mere artifice and carpentry. 
It refreshes, not wearies ; restores, not de- 
pletes ; invigorates, not weakens. It does 
not come, as the ancient sermon used to 
come, with more heads than Cerberus, and a 
reluctance to end as prolonged as the ser- 
pent's. It knows how to rivet attention and 
retain and reward it. It is master of a thou- 
sand arts, but these all submit themselves to 
one good rule, — namely, always to fit the 
style of treatment to the subject-matter. To 
model in clay, carve in wood and stone, 
mould in iron, beat and chase in gold and 
silver, — this is the safe secret of literary 



60 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

art. He who has the wit to use it is wel- 
come to steal it. 

If authors only wrote with a true literary 
motive or out of a real literary faculty, 
though the task of the critic would remain, 
that of the censor would he diminished. So 
long as so many people follow hook-making, 
under the mistaken impression that there is 
money in it, or exceptional honor or evidence 
of superior wit, there will he a rush of blood 
to that extremity, with all the perils accom- 
panying it. " Of making many books there 
is no end." If this was the woful complaint 
of the author of Ecclesiastes, so long before 
the invention of printing, what would that 
intrepid pessimist say now ? The British 
Museum has a million and a half of books, 
and the National Library in Paris has over 
two millions. It is estimated that twenty- 
five thousand volumes are published every 
year. An English critic is reported to have 
said that more than three thousand years 
would be needed for the merely mechanical 
process of reading the books which cither are 
or have been standard books of literature. 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 61 

Since our brief candle of seventy years will 
not hold out till all are read, it becomes nec- 
essary for us to select well and read wisely. 
Every poor book we read is so much time 
stolen from a good book. Such an exchange 
is the worst kind of robbery. 

Here on my table lie two books, — Taine's 
" English Literature " and Hardy's " Far from 
the Madding Crowd." The one is a full, 
voluminous, independent, and able resume 
and critique of English belles-lettres, from the 
beginning until now. If I read it, I shall 
get a knowledge of the origin of literature, 
its sources in race, environment, and epoch, 
— the finest instance extant of a full and 
gradually developed organ of truth and 
beauty, the body of English letters. I shall 
get this in such a shape, told as it is by a 
master among modern French writers^ that 
the book itself will be excellent literature, 
and its reading will be at once a source of 
information and a lesson in style. It will 
lead me, by the curiosity its comments excite, 
to read a hundred standard books which I 
might otherwise have known nothing of. It 



G2 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

will accustom me, by the freedom and inde- 
pendence of its judgments, to dare to look at 
the most famous writers with my own eyes, 
and see their faults as well as their merits ; 
it will put me on my guard even in regard 
to the very book I am reading, and by its 
example of bold exceptions taken to admired 
standards, I shall learn to take exceptions to 
Taine himself. I shall find entertainment, 
education, discipline, pleasure, and profit all 
combined, if I take up Taine's " English Lit- 
erature." But the volume is bulky, and I 
perchance am lazy. It is long, and will take 
long to finish. Moreover, it is full of con- 
nected meaning, and does not tell its story to 
the reader who skips. On the other hand, 
here is a little book in the handy size and 
shape of the Leisure Hour Series, easy to 
hold, easier still to understand, — not a talk 
about novels, but a novel itself, and written, 
besides, by a popular author. Which shall I 
read ? I think I will just glance at the 
novel ; see how it begins ; get the drift of it ; 
crack the shell and pick out the meat ! It 
will take but a few minutes. The title is so 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 63 

promising : " Far from the Madding Crowd.' ' 
Visions of country sweetness and repose, se- 
clusion from the world, emancipation from the 
slavery of city customs and society, freedom 
from all those excitements and alarms which 
keep the nerves of the urban dweller al- 
ways on the rack, float before the enchanted 
mind. The opening chapter seems to meet 
our expectations. It reveals a rural beauty 
amidst unique and captivating circumstances. 
We wonder what will become of her. We 
read on to see. Other interesting people 
come upon the scene. We grow curious 
about them. Their lives get entangled with 
the heroine's. The interest strengthens with 
the spinning of the threefold cord. Before 
we realize it we are caught in the meshes of 
the story-spinner, and there is no peace till 
the end is reached. Happy if there is any 
peace then. In this case it assuredly is not 
the peace we sought when we turned our 
backs on the " madding crowd." Country 
life, as it is depicted here, proves quite as 
madding as the city. The rustic beauty cap- 
tures in succession three hearts, giving her 



64 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

own to the one least worthy of it ; and hav- 
ing outlived the murder of one, and the in- 
sanity and imprisonment of another, she 
meekly marries at last the very man she 
began by refusing with scorn. Now there 
may be truth enough in this picture of a 
vain and foolish woman. No absurdity is un- 
likely with such a character. But she cer- 
tainly has not led us into the paths of peace, 
as we had hoped to be led, when the title of 
her story met our eyes. 

I do not complain of any unlikelihood 
in the story. On the contrary, the solitude 
of the country is not seldom as madding as 
the city's crowd, and there are tragedies of 
the field as brutal and fearful as those of the 
street. But when the tale is ended what 
has been gained by the reader ? " Entertain- 
ment for the time being," you may say ; and 
that is true. It is also true that there is a 
time in life for entertainment as for other 
things; "a time to laugh and a time to 
weep." But granted that laughing and weep- 
ing have their equal right to be, it makes 
some difference what we laugh or weep about. 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 65 



Here, if anywhere, is the place for the genial 
and fair-minded moralist to come in and say: 
" Have a care what you weep over and laugh 
at!" Tears water, in the heart of him who 
sheds them, the image of the thing he mourns. 
What a man laughs over he will likely brood 
over until his thoughts take the shape of his 
pleased or startled imagination. I do not 
wish my heart wrung with pity for a man 
who is only getting the just rewards of his 
folly or crimes, and who shows more sorrow 
for his sufferings than for the wrongs which 
brought them upon him. I feel personally 
outraged when I am compelled to laugh at 
something which I do not approve. Wit will 
have its due. Laugh we must, and probably 
shall, — all we who have a keen sense of 
humor, — whenever that sense is skilfully 
touched. It is as irresistible as tickling. 
But we protest openly or inwardly whenever 
this genial instinct in us is captured by a 
gross or immoral act or allusion. To return 
to Mr. Hardy's story, which we were in- 
veigled into reading, it ought in fairness to 
be said that the book is not bad, morally or 

5 



66 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

artistically, but it is profitless. Its heroine 
is n't worth knowing, and we grudge the 
time spent in making her acquaintance and 
following her fortunes and misfortunes. If 
we are in search of entertainment for a lei- 
sure hour, let us take it somewhere else than 
"far from the madding crowd." The other 
book, Taine's " English Literature," if too 
critical for your mood or too heavy for your 
leisure, would, if read at a suitable time, put 
you on the track of really standard authors, 
whom to know is to make progress. 

In Mr. Taine's judgment, the whole body 
of standard English literature labors under 
the artistic disadvantage of being studiously 
moral. I need not say that Mr. Taine is 
French. The English, he says, excel as 
moralists ; the French as artists. The rule 
of English literature, as laid down by the 
public taste, is : "• Be moral. All your novels 
must be such as may be read by young girls." 
And then follow five pages of satirical ad- 
vice which starts as if it were supposed to 
come from the British public, but soon falls 
into the author's own pronounced opinion. 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 67 

The gist of his indictment of English litera- 
ture is, that it misses the perfection of art 
because it is so careful of the moral. One 
would think from his sensitiveness to the 
least touch of retributive justice in the stories 
of the masters of English fiction, that Taine 
had a spite against morality. But he has not. 
He is only criticising what he considers its 
misplacement. He frankly admits elsewhere 
that the Northern, the German, and English 
race were right in asserting that man must 
seek greatness and permanence in liberty and 
justice, not, as the Latin races have sought 
it, in pleasure and power. This is admission 
enough of the supremacy of morals. But in 
art, literary and other, he maintains that the 
moral must not be the controlling aim. Let 
it be granted. And also let it be granted that 
English authors are convicted of righteous- 
ness, and miss sometimes the perfection of 
art by their haste to anticipate the Judgment. 
This comes in part from the limitations of the 
author's time. His story must be told within 
limits, and he cannot leave his characters in 
mid-ocean. He must bring them to some port, 



68 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

and therefore he sometimes makes quicker 
passages with his characters than Nature 
ever allows. But in this rush for justice, he 
offends as much against true morals as he 
does against true art. Haste is not the way 
of either. To one who believes in the moral 
constitution of the universe, the ends and 
methods of art and morals do not seem so far 
apart. At bottom they are the same. Only 
they must be approached from different sides. 
There seems also to be some truth in the gen- 
eral criticism of leading English novelists, that 
their characters are abstract qualities baptized 
with proper names and made to do service as 
lay figures to set off one or another of the ten 
commandments, rather than men and women 
with more faults than the one they stand for, 
and more virtues also than they get the credit 
for. I think we must admit that we rather 
expect Pecksniff to be a hypocrite and noth- 
ing more, Squeers to be a fraud, Quilp a 
brute, Weller a wag, Heep a knave, Pickwick a 
dear old fool, and so on, to the end of Dickens's 
long procession of heroes. But these people 
are not so much characters as caricatures. 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 69 

Thackeray certainly does preach, as Taine 
says of him, and his people are the illustration 
of his sermons. But there is a world of na- 
ture in them for all that. Pendennis and 
Laura, Clive Newcome and Ethel, Philip and 
the little sister, Esmond and Beatrix, — surely 
these are all real people, and, with their great 
company of associates in and out of " Yanity 
Fair," might say to the world of men, "We 
are of like passions as yourselves." 

It will be a surprise to many to find the 
earlier English novelists set down as inveter- 
ate moralists, — men whose stories seem to 
depict the very wantonness of immorality. 
But they are all made to do duty as moral 
philosophers, 'and hardly a noted English 
writer from Chaucer to Tennyson , or from 
Bichardson to Thackeray, escapes this inar- 
tistic imputation. And yet, while pressing 
this point against English writers as a defect 
of art, he celebrates the results of their work 
in words like these : " Frenchmen will say 
that they only half like these official or- lay 
preachers, — Defoe, Hogarth, Smollett, Rich- 
ardson, Johnson, and the rest. I reply that 



70 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

moralists are useful, and that they have 
changed a state of barbarism into a state of 
civilization." 

When I ask myself what Mr. Taine and his 
French confreres would have in the way of 
fine art in literature, I am obliged to infer 
that he would favor some logical and long- 
sustained role of revenge, such as is played 
by the Count of Monte Christo ; or some 
glorification of love, like George Sand's, or, 
latest fruit from the upas-tree of French liter- 
ature, — a pre-Raphaelite study in low-life 
in Paris, such as Zola knows how to write. 
Just to know what I was talking about, I 
have taken the trouble to read one of these 
realistic studies of Paris dirt. It may be 
that such sketches of low life have their 
value as a part of the testimony of the nine- 
teenth century in regard to one phase of its 
life. I do not dispute its truth, for I have 
no means of testing it. God help us, if men 
and women and children are indeed living 
this life below the brutes. The people who 
may safely read such testimony and know of 
such characters arc, I fear, not those who are 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 71 

most likely to read these books. Bad com- 
pany only improves those who are strong 
enough and good enough to make it better; 
and the people described in such stories are 
bad company. I do not see why it should be 
any safer or any less culpable to cultivate the 
acquaintance of vulgar and degraded people 
in books than in actual life. Such characters, 
as they appear in the book, may be even more 
demoralizing than their originals would be in 
real life, for their portraits have none of their 
repulsive odor, and may even win admiration 
for the skill with which they are depicted. I 
doubt if it is useful to know of the evil of 
the world very much in advance or in excess 
of our power and will to overcome it. The 
young will learn it fast enough without the 
aid of these books. And meantime the knowl- 
edge of evil gained from books which inspire 
horror of it, but lend no aid in combating or 
avoiding it, does more harm than good. It 
quickens feelings which it makes no attempt 
to use in saving endeavors. The sight of 
wrongs may stir us to abate them. The story 
of them, told as exciting fiction, more often 



72 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

leaves us a prey to sentimental tears and 
vain regrets. The poet and the novelist give 
a soul to facts. The historians too, who take 
their inspiration from letters rather than sta- 
tistics, are quick writers. These translators 
of the spirit of their age preserve a living 
tradition, by means of which we recover 
the past and know the present. Taine says 
he would give " fifty volumes of charters and 
a hundred volumes of state papers for the 
memoirs of Cellini, the epistles of Saint Paul, 
the table-talk of Luther, and the comedies 
of Aristophanes." It is because in such un- 
premeditated memorials as these, the age 
enrolls itself and comes forth in due time, 
winged and living, the very spirit of the 
past. He also claims that it is chiefly by 
the study of literature that one may con- 
struct a moral history. For literature is 
character-painting, and characters are the 
factors of history. Creeds and constitutions 
are far inferior to literature as witnesses of 
man to man. 

" The articles of a code or a 'catechism only 
show us the spirit roughly and without deli- 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 73 

cacy." " If there are any writings in which 
politics and dogma are full of life, it is in elo- 
quent discourses of the pulpit and the tribune, 
memoirs and unrestrained confessions." It 
has long been my opinion that the truest 
and best literature of every generation goes 
into the fire. The family and friendly letters 
that perish with the reading, or, if they linger 
beyond the lives of their correspondents, 
finally go to the mill as old paper, or to the 
flames as a part of the spoils of spring clean- 
ing, contain the truest and liveliest image, 
and therefore the best literature, of the age 
in which they were written. There are let- 
ters now in the keeping of tender friends, 
who cannot summon courage to destroy 
them, nor yet to publish them, in which 
the priceless materials for a veritable history 
of the last quarter of a century in this 
country are preserved. A few of these may 
survive, and they will be the seed-corn of 
the coming history. 

But it is useless to speak of private cor- 
respondence as literature. It is out of reach 
and out of the question. " Tell us, if you 



7-4 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

can, by name/' one may say, " what books 
are good literature and worth reading." An 
impossible task, indeed, if the answer is to be 
exhaustive or inclusive of all useful books. 
Before attempting to answer it, it is impor- 
tant to renew our early distinction between 
the literary and the moral standard. The in- 
discriminate use of that much-abused word, 
" good," confuses many questions. " Good 
for what?" one has to ask, when the de- 
mand is made for good literature or good 
reading. What is good for its moral influ- 
ence may not be good as a piece of literary 
work. And what is excellent as a work 
of art may not be morally good. I think 
common usage will justify our saying that 
" good reading " means reading that will do 
the reader good morally, while good litera- 
ture, strictly speaking, means that which is 
true to life and character and correct in 
style, whether morally nutritious or not. 

For good reading, then, I would go to 
the standard English writers, reading but 
sparingly the novelists before "Walter Scott, 
but freely and repeatedly Scott and the 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 75 

greatest of his successors, — Jane Austen, 
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Haw- 
thorne. I would adopt the same rule with 
English poets, taking Shakspeare as the 
dividing line, and making him among poets, 
as Scott among novelists, the writer to be 
read again and again. I would let Milton, 
as prose writer, stand between the better 
present and the poorer past of English es- 
sayists, leading on to Addison, Macaulay, De 
Quincey, Carlyle, and Emerson. I would read 
Herodotus for history, if it were only to cor- 
rect the impression that the father of history 
must needs be dull. And then I would read 
McMaster's recent history of our own country 
since the war of the Revolution, to correct a 
similar impression in regard to modern his- 
tory. Prescott is not dull ; Motley assuredly 
is not; Macaulay never wrote a stupid page ; 
Carlyle is as exciting as a thunder-storm ; 
Froude is as interesting as fiction, sometimes, 
perhaps, for the same reason, for example, 
where he makes Henry VIII., as Emerson 
says, a good family man. History and biog- 
raphy have been considering their ways in 



76 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

the latest dispensation of the spirit of truth, 
and every great nation and every great man 
has now its lively historian and biographer. 

As for books of travel, they were never so 
many or so good as now. Kane and Hayes 
and Hall have made the Arctic regions famil- 
iar as New England snow-storms ; Livingstone 
and Speke and Baker and Stanley have so 
opened Africa in their books, that he who 
reads feels that he has been there. Wallace 
in the East Indies makes science a fascinat- 
ing outing. Italy and Greece attract the writ- 
ers whose pens adorn whatever they touch: 
Hillard, Hare, Taiue, Ho wells, and Mahaffy. 
Wallace carries you to Russia; Yambery to 
Turkistan ; Hare and Hay to Spain ; Hue to 
Thibet and China ; McCleod and Chunder Dutt 
to India ; and Pumpelly across two continents. 

The embarrassment is not in the poverty of 
books, but in their richness and variety. To 
help the reader, good manuals have been pre- 
pared, such as " The Reading of Books," by 
Charles H. Thwing; " Good Reading," by Mr. 
Perkins ; " What shall I Read? " by J. H. V. ; 
" A Guide to English History," by Professor 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 77 

Allen, and a general manual of historical litera- 
ture by Professor Charles K. Adams ; " Books 
and Reading," by President Porter of Yale 
College; No. 17 of the Harvard College Library 
Bulletin, with a list of the most useful refer- 
ence books ; " Poole's Periodical Index," and 
other special indices for leading magazines. 
The public libraries of the country have taken 
the whole people into their hands, and nearly 
all of them publish aids and guides to read- 
ing, which, if they are heeded, must keep the 
bookfaring man from error, in spite of him- 
self and the publishers. Among these there 
is nothing better than the monthly reference 
lists issued by W. E. Foster, the librarian of 
the Providence Public Library, and the bul- 
letins of the Boston Public Library and the 
library of Harvard University. With such 
guides as these and others like them, we 
may all know what to read, if we will take 
the trouble to inquire at the right place. 

I feel that the subject lies very near to the 
moral and spiritual well-being of men. Next 
to the people whose company we keep, we 
are most influenced by the books we read. I 



78 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

am not sure but the books are the more in- 
fluential of the two. Our friends and com- 
panions are of necessity few and confined to 
a narrow round ; but books take us into 
every walk in life. They carry us around 
the world and up into the starry spaces. 
Through them we get access to every grade 
of society. Palace and hut are alike open 
to us. The queen reads us her diary, and 
the cobbler his verses. We make a jour- 
ney to the moon with Jules Verne, or navi- 
gate twenty thousand leagues under the sea. 
We live the life of Crusoe on a desert isl- 
and, or in the crowded city with Dr. John- 
son. We visit all lands without leaving our 
own door; know all people without going to 
know them ; share all emotions, all sensations, 
all fortunes, through sympathy, when the ex- 
perience would utterly consume us, and live 
in all past time as vividly as in the present ; 
and all this comes to us by way of literature. 
If our admirations are our fate, and they seem 
to shape our characters more than anything 
else, then we are as much a part of all that 
we have read as of all that we have seen. 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 79 

I doubt if we can exaggerate the effect of 
sympathetic reading. Our models are in the 
books more often than in the circle of real 
folks that surround us. Thackeray's Colonel 
Newcome has crystallized around him a pure 
deposit of the best type of English manhood 
in the present generation. There was a time 
when every young girl's hero was the heir of 
Redclyffe or John Halifax. The characters 
in Miss Aguilar's "Home Influence " were as 
real to my youth as the people with whom 
I lived. If in the life to come we are per- 
mitted to meet those whom we have known 
on earth, we shall look for Jane Austen's men 
and women rather than our old townsfolk. 
Such reality and potency is there in the crea- 
tions of genius ; and literature is the second 
creation in which these characters live. 

There is one book of which I have not 
spoken at all ; not because it does not con- 
tain poetry, history, biography, travel, con- 
fessions, and teaching, — each the best and 
most natural of its kind, — but because by 
an unhappy misunderstanding its pages have 
been sealed as dogma. One levelling plane 



80 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

of doctrinal purpose has passed over its 
infinite variety and picturesque inequality, 
until it has become as smooth as a globe and 
as inartistic. And yet, in spite of this smooth- 
ing down and killing out of its lively signifi- 
cance, the men and women of the Bible do 
start up, — real men and women, — and win 
our love or reprobation, according to their 
characters. We pity Abel and condemn Cain ; 
w r e revere Abraham and tremble for his son ; 
we are sorry for Esau and indignant with 
Jacob ; we love Joseph and hate his brethren ; 
we admire David and Jonathan and blame 
Saul ; we wonder at Samson and exult in 
his terrible revenge, albeit with pity for 
his fate ; we marvel at Job ; we glory in 
Elijah ; w r e feel the sublime faith of Isaiah, 
and exult in the constancy of his fellow- 
prophets ; we shudder over Daniel in his den 
of lions, and catch the moral that lurks in 
the fable of Jonah's voyaging with the fish. 
Escaped from the Old and entered upon the 
New Testament, we do not wholly lose the 
charm of biography and correspondence with 
their literary forms, notwithstanding the clasp 



LITERATURE AND MORALS. 81 

of dogmatic theology which seeks to confine 
it. Jesus and his friends, John the Baptist 
and Paul, are too real to be spirited away 
by any process of abstraction. And thus, in 
spite of theory and decree to the contrary, 
the genuine literary character of the Bible 
asserts itself and brings all the attraction of 
naive narration to bear upon the heart and 
taste of mankind. It is this, far more than 
supposed literal inspiration or unvarying re- 
ligious significance, which maintains the Bible 
as the educator alike of the imagination, the 
mind, and the heart of humanity. It runs 
the whole course of literature, — poetry, 
fable, legend, biography, history, proverb, 
fairy tale, or its early equivalent, parable, 
that is, fiction, prophecy, dream, vision, 
tragedy, travel, correspondence, philosophy, 
apocalypse, — and its art is only equalled by 
its truth, when rightly apprehended. The 
most horrible and the most beautiful things 
are told in its pages. It reveals man in all 
his possibilities, from brute to angel. And. 
the justification of this laying bare of what is 
in man may be found in the demands of art 

6 



82 LITERATURE AND MORALS. 

as well as of morals. Here, at least, man is 
suffered to speak out ; and the evil that ap- 
pears is so accompanied or followed by an 
avenging righteousness, that the revelation 
of the man of sin is not attended by any 
temptation to imitate him. 

In this, as it seems to me, the moral and 
the literary aim agree and show themselves 
at one. The knowledge of evil which one 
may learn in the Bible is mercifully accom- 
panied by the knowledge of its sin and its 
inevitable penalties. When this world-wide 
book is known for what it is, — a compen- 
dium of human nature deep as hell and high 
as heaven, — its strenuous teachings will be 
reached and grasped with a firmer hold and 
more grateful faith than ever. For it will 
be seen and known that it is the perfection 
of literature, that is, truth and grace ; and 
the beauty it adores and inspires will be the 
beauty of the Sistine Madonna and the shep- 
herd with the kid, — the beauty that has 
a beautiful meaning. 



IV. 
INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 




IV. 

IKDUSTBY AND MORALS. 
My Father worketh hitherto, and I ivork. — John v. 17. 

iHEN a convict in the Massachusetts 
State's Prison, who showed re- 
markable skill in a certain handi- 
craft, was asked if he could work 
like that before he came there, he answered : 
" No, or I should never have come here." 
He felt, and justly, that the profitable employ- 
ment of his time in skilful labor would have 
kept him from the crime for which he had 
been imprisoned. The statistics of crime 
confirm this man's opinion ; for out of two 
hundred and twenty inmates of the Massa- 
chusetts State's Prison in one year, one hun- 
dred and forty-seven had no trades, while 
only twenty-two could neither read nor write. 
If ignorance, therefore, is a source of crime. 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 



it is plainly ignorance of handicraft, rather 
than ignorance of reading and writing. If 
education is to be the bulwark of our national 
order, it must be an education of the peo- 
ple in something more than the schools, as 
commonly organized, now teach. Useful and 
necessary as the literary training of the com- 
mon schools may be, it can at best only post 
the pickets along the front where our civili- 
zation is encamped. The real defence must 
be found further back in the earthworks 
which the hands of the laborer have set up. 
In fine, the peace and order of a country de- 
pend upon the virtue and intelligence of its 
working-men. In estimating the moral uses 
of industrial art, therefore, we are met at the 
outset by this concurrent testimony of the 
convict and the prison statistics, that skilful 
industry is a great safeguard against crime. 

If time were not too precious to be spent 
in proving what is self-evident, I might at- 
tempt to show why this is so. I might dwell 
on the saving grace of occupation, the bless- 
ing of being so busy that vagrant thoughts 
and roving inclinations have no holiday for 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 87 

their profitless outing. The mischief which 
is proverbially convenient for idle hands to 
do is thus prevented ; and Satan, when he 
comes calling at the door or whistling out- 
side the window to lure us from our work, is 
politely though summarily told that we are 
not at home. I might enlarge at length upon 
the excellent economy of having one's house 
so full of good guests that it was never con- 
venient to receive any of the other kind. * 
But all this recommendation of useful occu- 
pation would be just as much in place in a plea 
for the professions as the trades, and I have 
set out upon a search for some of the especial 
benefits resulting to morality from the knowl- 
edge and practice of the industrial arts. 

First, I am going to claim that the hand is 
itself a direct factor in the development of the 
brain, and consequently that it has no small 
part to play in securing the true and happy 
operation of the mind. Dr. Brown-Sequard 
is quoted by Dr. Edward H. Clarke as saying 
that the left side of the brain, which co-oper- 
ates with the right hand, is more fully devel- 
oped than the right side of the brain, which 



88 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

corresponds with the left hand. This, they 
say, is due to the more frequent and diversified 
use of the right hand. And it has been co- 
gently argued, by men familiar with this fact, 
that we shall never have level-headed people, 
— people with really balanced brains, — until 
we educate them to be ambidextrous, or 
equally capable with both hands. However 
this may be, the simple physiological fact, 
if it is a fact, that the work of the hands 
affects the structure of the brain is enough 
to warrant the assertion that the knowing 
faculty in us depends in part upon the use 
we make of our hands. When the most 
spiritual of the New Testament writers wished 
to assure his hearers of the fulness of the 
knowledge he had of the word of life, he 
was not content with seeing and hearing, but 
he declared that he spoke of what his hands 
had handled. It is the sign-manual of real 
knowledge. What we have handled, we know. 
What but the instinctive trust we have in the 
discriminating sense of touch makes us all so 
eager to feel of what we see? "Hands off!" 
reads the watchful placard at the grand expo- 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 89 

sition, as if the exhibitor knew the tingling 
curiosity which makes a man's fingers go, 
with the certainty of iron to the magnet, 
towards every object that interests and at- 
tracts him. I remember, in the earlier exhi- 
bitions of the Mechanics' Charitable x\ssociation 
in Boston, it was customary to employ young 
ladies with small whips, to switch the fingers 
of too inquisitive visitors ; and my own hand 
carries the shameful memory to this day of 
the gentle castigation then bestowed upon it. 
How often we have agonized to see thought- 
less fingers working the ruin of the beauty 
they were asked to admire, — rubbing the 
bloom from grape or plum, feeling the rose 
petal as if it were common velvet, and spoil- 
ing the polish of precious woods or stone by 
drawing their finger-tips across them. They 
did not know what they were doing. Their 
act was due to the mind's desire for knowl- 
edge operating through those agile spies, the 
human digits. And as the hand changes its 
shape with what it holds, so the mind is half 
conformed to the things it knows. Logically 
and physiologically the dyer's mind, like his 



90 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

hand, " is subdued to that it works in." If 
the mind moves the hand, the hand in turn 
removes the mind ; the reaction is as sure as 
the action. There is such a thing, therefore, 
as brain-building by hand. And it is to this 
effect of the skilful handicrafts in develop- 
ing the brain, and thus qualifying the action 
of the mind, that I would first appeal in 
celebrating the mental and moral uses of 
industry. The rational element in all our 
moral judgments and deliverances is cer- 
tainly involved, in an intimate way, in the 
occupations of our hands. When the subtile 
connections between doino; and thinking: are 
searched and known, it will doubtless appear 
that habitual ways of viewing life and its 
problems are due in no small degree to the 
bias of one or another occupation. The 
combination of physical and psychical rela- 
tions between a man's calling and his call, 
that is, between his trade and his conception 
of life and its purposes for him, makes his 
choice of a profession one of the elements in 
his earthly fate. The tailor's proverbial mel- 
ancholy will refer itself to his sedentary and 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 91 

cross-legged avocation • the miller's shrewd- 
ness to the simple fact that everything is 
grist which comes to his mill ; the sailor's im- 
providence to his daily life within a plank's 
thickness of a watery grave ; the jeweller's 
gravity to his exclusive commerce with hu- 
man vanity ; and the undertaker's cheerful 
suavity to his familiarity with death, and con- 
sequent fearlessness of it. 

And I would place next in my enumera- 
tion of the moral economies of industry the 
wholesome contentment which a man must 
take in seeing and handling a piece of work 
which he has done, and done well. All our 
powers work best when we are contented. 
I do not say satisfied. We can be contented 
wherever we are in life's upward round of 
being, but we shall never be satisfied till we 
have reached our goal, — till we awake in 
God's likeness. Contentment, fulness of joy 
and cheer, according to our present capacity, 
is attainable this and every day. And I say 
that the sight and touch of some actual piece 
of handiwork which he has done, and done 
well, will go far to make a sensible man 



02 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

contented and happy. Fortunate he who is 
permitted to see the fruit of his labors. His 
every-day walk is a triumphal procession. 
The mason or carpenter going along the city 
streets sees on either side the trophies of his 
peaceful victories. Which is greater, the tri- 
umph of a Csesar or Napoleon, greeted as he 
returns to Rome or Paris with the acclamations 
of an excitable and fickle crowd, or the modest 
progress of the simple artisan, who, unnoticed 
by the people, is nevertheless greeted by the 
very stones as he passes by. cl This is he ! " 
the carved and stable arches cry aloud ; "this 
is he who made and fashioned us !" "He placed 
us where we securely stand ! " the tall ware- 
houses seem to say. " He paved and graded 
us!" the very streets proclaim. "We are 
his by creation !" carriage and dray and car 
and omnibus agree. He sees the work of his 
fingers in the clothes men wear. Every store 
window pays tribute to his skill. The memo- 
rials of his virtue arc in the walls themselves, 
not in their temporary decorations. Beset 
by these obvious and permanent celebrants 
of his skill, what can hinder the joyful sense 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 93 

of being useful and helpful in his day, with 
which the common builder and maker is at- 
tended? I could envy, if envy were not a 
forbidden luxury, the solid comfort with 
which a man who has put stone to stone, and 
beam to beam, and built the strong house, 
must look upon the finished work of his 
hands, and behold that it is very good. 
Something of the joy of the builder and 
maker of this mighty frame, in which suns 
and worlds are but granite blocks and the 
impalpable air the permanent cement, must 
attend this artificer and day-laborer. And 
when at last he rests from his labors, his 
works still follow him, carrying his name and 
the fame of his thoroughness and skill from 
generation to generation. 

It may seem hardly worthy to be classed 
among moral uses, but I cannot omit from 
this list that general proficiency which the 
mastery of a good trade promotes. Men 
agree to call this general proficiency or apt- 
ness for every practical emergency by the 
name of " handiness." As if they knew what 
it was which made a man really capable and 



94 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

ready-minded, they call the possessor of these 
traits a " handy man." The story of the " man 
who kept himself in repair " is enough to illus- 
trate the bearing of this gift or accomplish- 
ment upon the moral issue of the clay. Let 
him who has never known what it was to be 
impatient with a creaking door, a slamming 
blind, a scraping gate, a trunk that would n't 
open, or, being open, would n't shut, a moody 
lock and key, or any of the thousand and one 
obstinacies that human workmanship is liable 
to, say how much the ability to remedy these 
faults conduces to good-temper and neigh- 
borly kindness. Often the fate of nations 
turns on the timely presence of the man 
who can build a pontoon bridge or mend an 
engine. 

Again, we must not merge in any other 
moral quality that manly independence with 
which the possession of a good trade invests 
its owner. The consciousness that he can 
do something which the world wishes to have 
done, that there is always a market for his 
work, that he has not to go about begging 
employment, but can be sure that it would 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 95 

beg for him if he ceased to work ; this gives 
a man the sense of mutual dependence be- 
tween him and other men, which is what we 
often mean by independence. "You need 
me and I need you: it is an even thing," — 
let a man feel and say that to society, and he 
is no longer its slave or unworthy dependant. 
He hangs his head at no man. He is sure 
that if his health is spared he can always earn 
an honest living. 

There is one sure way out of all the injury 
and injustice, if injury and injustice there be, 
in the lot of the artisan. It is the way of 
excellence in work. Let a man add skill to 
strength, perfect finish to mere performance 
of his task, and he becomes invaluable to his 
employer. To lose him is to cripple the 
business ; and how this independence through 
the worth of his work dignifies a man ! He 
owes his place and power to no indulgence, 
favor, or patronage of the rich or the great, 
but carries his office in himself. This aristoc- 
racy of merit is a nobility which needs no 
patent. And whatever excellence in working 
can bring a man to it makes him so far a 



96 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

moral hero. As David Swing lias said : " The 
man who can lay a good country road de- 
serves immortality." 

Again, I find an especial aid to practical 
morality, in the undivided responsibility which 
attends the worker in wood, stone, or iron. He 
knows that his product will always be what 
he makes it. Given good material and good 
tools, the worker must take the blame if his 
handiwork is poor. No opposing will, no re- 
bellious sinner, lurks in the wood or iron, to 
undo all that the workman tries to do. There 
is no natural depravity in things. If some- 
thing akin to it comes out in chairs, tables, 
walls, ceiling, or roof, it must have come from 
the workman and his carelessness. This sense 
of personal and entire responsibility for what 
he does is a strong brace to manhood. The 
minister can always blame his people or they 
him, if the church drags. The doctor shelters 
himself behind the patient's insubordination or 
incurable malady. The schoolmaster protests 
that he cannot be held responsible because 
John or Mary will not learn. But the artisan 
is justly praised or blamed for his works. He 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 97 

is known by them. Buyers look for his name 
on tool or case, and safely order his goods 
without inspecting them. A reputation for 
good and honest product is a living spring of 
self-respect. What just rapture must that man 
feel who knows that his name is a synonyme of 
excellence wherever it is spoken. Machines 
drop their common titles and are known by 
his alone. " Ah ! you have a Corliss there," 
men say. Or, "You use a Woods, I see." "Is 
that a WJieeler & Wilson's ? " Is a Mackin- 
tosh a man or the best of waterproof coats ? 
Is a Stradivarius a violin or the name of an old 
maker of violins ? In art the common desig- 
nation of a really great picture is its artist's 
name. It is a Rubens, a Raphael, a Correggio, 
a Vandyke. As if men felt that the excel- 
lence of the superior handling of gross matter, 
as iron, wood, marble, or paint, was all in the 
person who handles them, they agree to give 
him all the praise. I say that this utter re- 
sponsibility for his work is an incentive to 
thoroughness and nicety of workmanship, and 
in this incentive there is great moral worth. 
The man who scamps his work is always, first 



98 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

or last, a scamp himself. The man who can 
shift the shame of his own failure upon the 
intractability of others will always be in peril 
of falling short of his full endeavor ; but 
the artist or the artisan pricked to his finest 
action by the assurance that his fate is not in 
another, but in himself, has a powerful mo- 
tive for effort and an undivided share in its 
rewards. 

Virtue, too, may find a natural ally in the 
agricultural and mechanical arts, because they 
bring men into intimate relations with Nature 
and her products. Land, water, and the sea- 
sons, the growing trees and herbs, wood, iron, 
coal, how intently these all must be studied 
and obeyed, if their productive capacities 
would be known and utilized ! It is daily 
sitting at the feet of the sun to be instructed 
in his ways ; taking lessons of the earth in 
the apportionment and sequence of the crops ; 
patient searching of the stars to learn " what 
of the night ; " tracking the coal to its beds, 
and ore to its veins and pockets, — weighing, 
measuring, adjusting, conquering Nature by 
obeying her, — that make up the mechanic's 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 99 

and the farmer's day. In all this co-labor with 
the earth and skies there is a constant dis- 
cipline in self-adaptation to the facts of the 
universe, and an increasing acquaintance with 
its forces and laws. If apprenticeship with a 
man of good business habits is an education 
in trade, what must be the influence of daily 
life and work with a partner like Nature, who 
never breaks her word, always keeps her 
appointments, and generously rewards the la- 
borer with all the profits of his toil and her 
husbandry? Can any better schooling in char- 
acter be found ? But this is not all. Inevitably 
by the tracing of Nature's means and ways 
of working, the mind of the thoughtful work- 
man must be enlarged. It will grow not 
alone, as indicated at the beginning, by the 
physical reaction of the hand and the brain ; 
but the recognition of thought in Nature, 
and the application of thought to manu- 
facture will furnish the best possible mental 
discipline. Nature gives not only the pat- 
terns of mechanical and decorative art, but 
she works on the precise formulae which the 
mathematician works out. In the butterfly's 



100 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

wing the engineer discovers the tubular sup- 
port which combines most perfectly lightness 
and strength, and he copies it in his bridge. 
The law of phyllotaxis, by which the leaves 
grow on the plant, is the same which orders 
the courses of the planets. The astronomer's 
slate and the timely observation of the tele- 
scope discover a new planet simultaneously. 
No wonder the best brain of this generation 
turns to natural science and the mechanic 
arts. It finds there a discipline as well as 
a theme congenial to its powers. The late 
Wendell Phillips declared that the men of 
most brains do not go to Congress as they 
used to, but betake themselves to the fac- 
tory and railroad. They build Lawrence 
and Lowell and Atlanta and Birmingham, 
instead of making orations in the senate. 
They construct railroads to the Pacific coast, 
or lay telegraph cables under the Atlantic, 
instead of seeking a cabinet appointment. 
And when one considers, only in the igno- 
rant way in which our inexperience allows us 
to consider it, the compass of mind and varied 
gifts of calculation and management involved 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 101 



in the successful conduct of a great mill, 
manufactory, or railway, the tribute seems 
hardly unjust. Of all the varied exhibitions 
of the Centennial Exposition, none was more 
impressive or indicative of mental force than 
Machinery Hall. When the soft and brilliant 
pageantry of the finer arts shall have faded 
from our recollection, or melted, like a tinted 
cloud, into the past, that majestic Corliss 
engine will stand like a mountain peak un- 
veiled, and the busy trades that prospered 
by its power will haunt the memory like a 
familiar song. I am speaking of these things 
as the product and, in turn, the producer of 
mind. They testify to thought and quicken 
thought. 

We need not depend upon any stated ex- 
position which one man has seen and another 
not ; but look at any section of this busy 
and intercommercial country and see how it 
bears witness to mind applied to mechanics. 
Look at any great city. Take New York, 
bound together and enmeshed by innumera- 
ble rails and wires, like the great droning fly 
she is, in the grip of that incarnate piece of 



102 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

intellect, the mechanical spicier, with mind 
in every claw, infinite capacity of spinning 
and thinking along the line of his intermina- 
ble rope. What a spectacle is this of all-em- 
bracing mind at work, by the aid of physical 
powers cunningly applied, to lift this strug- 
gling and unwilling world to its profitable 
place in the web that holds the stars. I offer 
no apology for the homely comparison. The 
spider is a divine institution. In Honolulu 
he is treated as a friend, allowed an honored 
corner in the room, encouraged to grow to 
large dimensions, and permitted to indulge 
his merciful appetite to its utmost capacity. 

But greater uses still await us. The inti- 
macy with Nature and her schooling of the 
intellect may bring the thoughtful farmer or 
mechanic a long way toward the discovery 
and reverent recognition of the divine Ar- 
tificer of the sun and stars. For if he finds 
sun, moon, and stars made and ordered in 
their courses according to laws that repeat 
themselves in his own mind, must he not 
infer a mind not wholly unlike his own as 
their originator ? And since he knows that 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 103 

no man has made them, what can he do but 
reverently acknowledge God ? No mechanic 
art is profoundly learned or well elaborated 
unless it brings the artisan to this rational 
and natural conclusion. 

Thus the plea we started to make for the 
mental and moral uses of industrial art, be- 
ginning with its preventive and corrective 
effect upon crime, and taking up successively 
the reflex action of the hand upon the brain 
itself, — the contentment, proficiency, rescue 
from idleness, encouragement of independ- 
ence and the sense of personal responsi- 
bility ; wholesome and intimate contact with 
Nature and its thought-provoking forces which 
mechanical study secures, ■ — rises at last to 
the recognition of the divine Originator of 
this mindful universe. 

But besides all this the artisan may derive 
self-respect in his labor and humane impulse 
from his work, from the consideration of its 
effect upon the comfort and happiness of 
other men, — the maintenance of social ties, 
and the prevalence of human sympathies 
among men. 



104 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

What but the railroads connecting shore 
with shore, and steamers making the ocean 
a means of communication instead of a bar 
to intercourse, have made possible the inter- 
change of product for product: cloth for 
bread, and spice for oil ? What but these 
nervous wires across the lands, and that great 
spinal cord under the sea, make it possible 
for all the world to know simultaneously the 
death of a prince and the grief of a queen ? 
These are the achievements of labor. 

Is it possible to exaggerate their influence 
in promoting human interests, philanthropy, 
community among nations, and finally con- 
cord and peace ? When our late president 
died, why was the whole world united in our 
bereavement ? Because by means of the 
telegraph all civilized countries knew and 
felt it at the same time. The serious thought 
of such results as these following their labors 
would, if it were habitual among working- 
men, lift their lives and labors into grateful 
respect and reverence. 

It does not become any man, least of all 
him who professes to revere as the head of 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 105 

his church the carpenter of Nazareth, to 
ignore the religious value or forget the moral 
uses of invention and handicraft. I do not 
forget the day or the place in which I am 
speaking. On the contrary, I have chosen 
my subject because of its fitness to both. 
The peril of the church is its tendency to 
deem its association an end in itself. But 
its mission is rather to interpret to man the 
moral and spiritual meaning of his every-day 
life. Industry is not honored as it should 
be, in the church or out of it. Our churches 
undervalue it. Society disparages it. Capital 
tyrannizes over it. It is more often flattered 
by demagogues than reasoned with by states- 
men; and the bribery, cajolery, appeals to 
passion and prejudice with which working- 
men are too commonly addressed, are an ad- 
mission of the poor esteem in which, as a class, 
they have been held. It is one of the fore- 
most duties of the church to attempt the 
correction of all this, by the respect and hos- 
pitality with which it addresses working-men. 
I fear very few of our churches could bear the 
inquisition of the apostle James, if he should 



106 INDUSTRY AND MORALS. 

examine them touching their respect of per- 
sons. The poorly dressed man must take the 
back seat in our synagogues, while the gold 
ring and goodly apparel command the broad 
aisle. It is a shame and practical contradic- 
tion and infidelity in the church, which bases 
itself upon the dignity of human nature, that 
we cater to wealth and social standing, and 
give simple manhood our neglect. 

Again, the church might do something 
to elevate the artisan class by laboring to 
modify the common-school system in such a 
way that it will recognize handicraft as the 
natural and probable vocation of nine tenths 
of the youth of this country. Twelve mil- 
lions of laborers in the United States stand 
on one side, and four hundred thousand law- 
yers, doctors, ministers, and school-teachers 
on the other ; and the question is, which has 
the larger claim upon a system of education 
designed for the public welfare and supported 
by taxation of the people at large ? The 
church is not travelling beyond its becoming 
domain, when its members devote themselves 
to reforms like these. 



INDUSTRY AND MORALS, 107 

But this is a subject of itself, and one upon 
which we cannot enter here. Enough, as we 
have already shown, that by the study and 
presentation of the ways of Him who worketh 
hitherto in the things that are made, and of 
him who said, " And I work," we shall gain 
a new apprehension of the glory and beauty 
of the orderly universe in which we pass our 
days ; and this high indorsement of the claims 
of industry, and illustration of its grandeur, 
will give energy to our work and reality to 
our worship. 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 



V. 

BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great 
treasure and trouble therewith. — Prov. xv. 16. 

f ET us speak first of what are called 
" futures." Business men deal- 
ing in cotton, corn, wheat, beef, 
pork, bonds, and stock agree to 
deliver the same on some future day, at a 
given price. They are supposed to know 
their business, and their calculations and en- 
gagements are based on this knowledge. If 
these transactions are genuine dealings in 
real produce or its equivalent, nothing can 
be said against them on the score of honesty. 
If the contracting parties are ready to take 
the risks it is their own affair; and yet, at 
the peril of exposing my own lack of business 
enterprise and capacity, I must say that it 



112 BUShXESS AND MORALS. 

s 

seems to me it would be better to en^ao:e 
to furnish these supplies at the u going price " 
at the time of delivery. This is what the 
plain farming people of my acquaintance 
a^ree to do. If you wish to emm^e your 
winter apples or potatoes or wood of them, 
they offer to deliver the things at a future 
day and receive what is then the market 
price. Sometimes the coal dealer, in return 
for early orders, delivers his coal at a cheaper 
rate than the market-price at the time of 
delivery. But the " going price " is generally 
the accepted rate. Thus neither the buyer 
nor the seller is injured. If the one does not 
make as much money by this method, the 
other does not lose as much. A fair profit 
is sure always, and there is no risk in such 
transactions, unless the supply fails. This 
fixing the price two, four, or six months be- 
fore the sale or the actual exchange, exposes 
one or the other of the contracting parties to 
the risk of excessive loss. The merchant has 
to hedge or double, to break the possible fall. 
If he had nothing to consider but the chances 
of nature, his problem would be comparatively 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 113 

safe ; for, taking the year through, seed-time 
and harvest never fail. But when to the 
variations of production are added the uncer- 
tainties produced by monopoly, cornering, 
combination, fluctuating cost of transporta- 
tion, and all the ills that trade is heir to, the 
use of prophecy in business transactions be- 
comes more and more difficult. 

It is not, however, for the purpose of giving 
business men hints as to the best way of 
managing their affairs, — a matter in which 
I might more properly learn of them, — that I 
am speaking now. There is an expressive 
word which the business world frequently 
applies to a class of operations which I wish 
to separate from the real and lawful barter 
we have been speaking of. When men w T ith 
no goods of their own, and no money with 
which to purchase them, undertake to buy 
or sell corn or cotton or stock on some com- 
ing day, never expecting really to do either, 
but simply betting that the staple in question 
will be worth this or that price on the given 
day, then they leave the ranks of genuine 
business men and become adventurers. They 

8 



114 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

belong to the same class as those vagrant 
people who pretend to be what they are not. 
To affect a fortune which you have not is no 
more respectable than to take a name or title 
which does not belong to you. It is sailing 
under false colors. It is gambling without 
putting clown any money. I am not decry- 
ing real transactions, or the exchanges of 
real commodities, and stocks representing 
invested capital are commodities as well as 
wheat or corn ; but I am speaking of paper 
promises to buy or sell, when the promiser 
has neither the money to buy nor the goods 
to sell, and no reasonable prospect of having 
either at any future time. If all the trans- 
actions of the stock exchange, for example, 
were required to furnish their equivalents in 
stock on any one day, it is doubtful if the 
whole ocean could furnish water enough to 
make the stock go round. So the same stock 
does duty for a multitude of brokers' en- 
tries and their speculating clients. Every 
meeting of the stock exchange brings to- 
gether an army of dealers who have noth- 
ing to sell and nothing but doubtful bank 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 115 

accounts wherewith to buy. The assembling 
of these gentlemen is more like a set-to of bulls 
and bears, with which they have been fitly 
compared. A level-headed, quick-eyed, and 
stentorian chairman receives and announces 
the bids made by the howling mob of frantic 
dealers before him. " Ophir/' " Gould and 
Curry," "Comstock," "Virginia Consolidated," 
— all the variable mining stocks of California 
went up and down like the waves of the sea, 
in the stormy meeting of the Stock Exchange 
of San Francisco which I once witnessed ; and 
I can truly say that the feeding of the seals 
in Woodward's Garden, which I saw on the 
succeeding day, was a dignified and quiet 
proceeding in comparison with this concourse 
of men. They shouted, they roared, they 
swung their hands in mid-air, they rushed, 
they crowded, they glared at each other, and 
screamed for recognition by the President of 
the Board. Schoolboys on their play-ground 
who should make such a row would be refused 
another recess. And yet these were leading 
business men, and this was the usual order of 
business. I was told at the time that there 



116 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

was hardly a regular shop-keeper or dealer in 
the city who did not dabble more or less in 
mining stocks. The soundness, that is, of the 
legitimate business of San Francisco depended 
as much upon the price of stocks as upon the 
value of the goods in trade. The spirit of 
speculation had possessed all business, so that 
all the earnings and investments of a well- 
conducted firm were liable at any moment 
to be swallowed up in the losses of some out- 
side speculation. It was this which gave 
such a feverish habit to California life, and 
made its prosperity so changeable and uncer- 
tain. What was typical of California twenty 
years ago has now spread over the whole 
country. New York has surpassed its West ern 
rival in stock-gambling, and Chicago hardly 
falls behind New York; and so the great cities, 
pandering to the speculative spirit throughout 
the country, offer themselves as its agents 
and brokers, making themselves rich and 
warm in the fleece of the lambs. 

Like all other evils that infest human so- 
ciety, this bottomless trading will go on until 
its injuries to legitimate commerce and to 



BUSIKtSS AND MORALS. H7 

innocent victims become unendurable. Then 
society will rise and put the thing down. It 
will be clearly seen that the buying and sell- 
ing based on imaginary possessions is nothing 
more nor less than betting; and betting is 
nothing more nor less than gaming ; and 
gaming is already unlawful and disgraceful. 
When the law which prohibits gambling in 
certain of its recognized forms sees clearly 
that all betting is gambling, and punishes that 
too, in all its forms, then our legal safeguard 
against this curse will be complete. But, 
pending that better day, it is our privilege 
and duty to create a public sentiment on this 
subject which may anticipate the law and 
make it operative when it is made. 

All honest business is either productive or 
promotive. It either makes goods or facili- 
tates their equitable exchange. Gaming does 
neither. It makes nothing. It only secures 
an unfair exchange, which is practical rob- 
bery. Business says: "For value received 
I promise to pay." Gaming compels a man 
to pay without value received. Raffling, lot- 
teries, betting pools, card-playing for money, 



118 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

stock-gambling, futures that have no inclorser 
in the present, all these things are palpable 
gaming, and the man who condemns the one 
ought in consistency to condemn all. Church 
fairs, where everything from a pincushion to 
a piano is sold on shares, are just as unprin- 
cipled as Monte Carlo or Baden-Baden. They 
may not lead immediately to ruin and suicide, 
but they may start the youth on a career 
which will end there. How can a man re- 
fuse to take a share in this fine saddle or that 
rich counterpane when beauty comes to him 
and pleads with him in the name of charity ? 
It seems mean to refuse ; and yet I believe 
any young man thus appealed to could better 
afford to ask how much the article in ques- 
tion is expected to 'bring when all the tickets 
are taken, and then expend the entire sum 
in purchasing the prize, than to go sinking 
his money piecemeal into every raffle that 
besets him, and running his chances of losing 
it all, or, worse fate, of drawing something 
for twenty-five cents which is worth as many 
dollars. He knows he has no just right to the 
thing. Chance has given him the advantage 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 119 

over a hundred others, each as generous, as 
worthy, and as venturesome as himself. He 
feels meanly in taking it, wishes to give it 
again to the fair, to be raffled for yet again ; 
or if he carries it home, carries with it an 
uneasy consciousness that he has secured 
something without paying for it and incurred 
a debt which he can never repay. 

I see that the Roman Catholic Church is dis- 
cussing the expediency of forbidding raffling 
at its fairs. I hope it will not end in dis- 
cussion ; for no church has used this method 
of increasing its finances more frequently or 
profitably. I do not cast this imputation, 
however, upon that church alone. I know 
no sect that is sufficiently sinless in this mat- 
ter to cast the first stone. All have sinned 
and come short of the right standard. It is 
not true that valuable articles cannot be dis- 
posed of in any other way. These same ar- 
ticles are sold every day in our stores without 
resort to raffling. People who wish them 
will buy them, and those who do not wish 
them should not be tricked into their pur- 
chase or chance possession. It is always 



120 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

costly to "buy what you do not want, how- 
ever low the price ; and of all forms of 
■wealth, nothing is so burdensome as the ele- 
phant one draws in a charitable lottery. Sales 
of really marketable articles, for one or an- 
other good cause, need not be objectionable. 
People who cannot open their hearts wide 
enough to extract a dollar for your object, 
will often spend many times as much in gifts 
and purchases at your fair, and enjoy doing 
it. And, what is better, every donor of a 
needle-book to the sale will feel a dispropor- 
tionate interest in its object from that time 
on. Her heart is with her treasure. Honest 
barter is no disgrace to any man or cause. 
But selling by chance, buying by lot, trad- 
ing by teasing, profiting by cajolery, making 
gains by persecuting your best friends, are 
offences against friendship and good manners, 
to say nothing of good morals, which make 
a much larger demand upon your friend's 
charity than the " unwilling dollar " he gives 
to your importunity. Don't do it ! Discour- 
age all such impositions. Only take part in 
sales that refuse to admit rallies and lotteries, 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 121 

and see if you cannot keep at least one cor- 
ner — the church corner — of this excitable 
world free from the fever of gambling. 

I know what an ugly word " gambling " is, 
and how easy it is to confound with it some 
really harmless proceeding. I have been try- 
ing in vain for several days to get a definition 
of gambling which should be neither longer 
nor shorter than the thing itself. It is not 
enough to call" it an appeal to chance, and 
blame it on that single score. The appeal 
to chance, other things being equal, is often 
a very just way of deciding doubtful cases. 
The resort to drawing lots is frequently re- 
ported in the Old Testament and in the New ; 
it is the way in which the apostles, after first 
praying, proceeded to choose their twelfth 
member. Among the Romans the same name 
which means a lot meant also the response 
of a divinity. For by lot their oracles were 
often declared. There is nothing necessarily 
wrong in an appeal to chance. But gambling 
is an appeal to chance for a mean and selfish 
end. It is an attempt to get the rewards 
of work without working, and to do this at 



122 BUSINESS AXD MORALS. 

the expense and injury of somebody else. 
The gambler neither produces nor promotes 
the fair exchange of products. His gains are 
not the just reward of his skill, for such skill 
has no appreciable value. As well might the 
Jew Fagin and his rascally company of skilled 
pickpockets claim that their plunder was the 
fair wages of their audacity and address, as 
the gambler reckon his winnings as honest 
earnings. Fashion and custom throw a spe- 
cious gilding over many an act which in 
itself is really the dirtiest kind of dirt. Eng- 
lish society, playing whist night after night 
for small stakes, is a school for gambling. 
American society following suit and adding 
games of its own devising, is " another." The 
cradle of unlawful commercial speculation, 
with its wide-spread ruin, is the elegant draw- 
ing-room in which gentlemen and ladies play 
cards for money. The church and the home 
must share between them no small part of the 
responsibility of gambling at large. 

They cultivate the taste for excitement, 
which, more than greed, prompts men to game. 
Of course the professional gambler is actuated 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 123 

by greed. He makes it his business, and adds 
to skill at the game a thousand arts and de- 
ceits, — deliberate, intentional, and ingenious 
cheats, by which he succeeds in trapping his 
unwary playmates. Few people are so skilful 
in disguising their feelings that they can con- 
ceal from a practised eye the general charac- 
ter and value of their cards. A hundred signs 
that you know not of betray you to your 
gaming opponent. If your face were a mirror, 
it could not reflect your hand more distinctly 
than it already does to this plotting player 
across the table. He meantime has schooled 
his face to personate the Sphinx; and as 
that awful monument rises above the desert 
sands, hard, stony, inscrutable, so the gam- 
bler's impenetrable face, motionless and piti- 
less, stands above the desert sands that have 
engulfed homes, temples, and caravans of men 
and beasts. It is because there is such a be- 
ing as a professional gambler, and because 
he is, by his own confession and boast, an ac- 
complished cheat and swindler, that we do 
not like to apply the word to betting and 
gaming people who are otherwise honest and 



124 BUSINESS AiXD MORALS. 

respectable. They bet and play fairly, as they 
will say. and do not refuse to take the con- 
sequences. In the code of morals prevalent 
among these gentlemen, I believe gambling 
debts take precedence of all others. A man 
who is not ashamed to fail and half pa}^ his 
honest creditors, would feel scandalized if any- 
body could accuse him of refusing to pay his 
losses at cards or at the race-course. If the 
truth were known, many a business failure 
is due, in fact, to this misuse of the money 
which is justly due legitimate creditors. 
" Where has the missing money gone ? " men 
ask. Go ask the kings and queens in the 
playing cards. If they cannot tell you, then 
the knave can. 

It is the fascination of hazard, the excite- 
ment of risk, as we were saying, more than 
greed, which makes the amateur gambler of 
good society. Money at stake adds just so 
much to the zest of the game. It is the al- 
coholic principle. Fermentation has begun 
when betting begins. Intoxication is not far 
off, or something worse ; for, while intem- 
perance makes men drunk, gambling makes 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 125 

men crazy. We must nip it in the bud. Dis- 
countenance and rebuke its first beginnings ! 
Be jealous of the least appearance of gam- 
bling ! I do not say that a man should never 
play cards or backgammon because cards and 
dice are often used for gambling purposes. 
The most innocent, useful, and necessary 
things may be made the occasion of betting. 
But I do say, that not for a moment should 
men allow themselves to put up the least sum 
of money on the results of a game. Do as one 
of my friends once did when one of his com- 
panions in the game laid money on the table, 
and said, " We may as well make some pro- 
vision for the cigars/" My friend, who was 
no unco' good man, and liked his game of 
cards and his cigars too, instantly called the 
waiter and ordered cigars for the company at 
his own cost. " I never play for money," 
was all the explanation he gave. It was 
enough. They could not accuse him of mean- 
ness. They saw that he was a man principled 
against gaming, and they respected him for 
it. The first step here, as elsewhere, is the 
step that costs. Once let it be known, by a 



126 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

simple, decisive step, a quick, decided word, 
that you never bet, and nobody will expect 
you to bet. You will be delivered at once 
from temptation and solicitation. 

Those who have visited the gambling houses, 
or, as they are properly called, " gambling 
hells," of the large cities, say that the ma- 
jority of their visitors are young men. This 
warns us that we must interfere. It means 
that the young, the wards of society, those 
for whom society is specially responsible, are 
made the victims of designing and tempting 
gamesters. They are green, and can be easily 
fooled. They are fond of excitement, and will 
go where they can find it. The devil likes 
young blood. We must thwart him. Better 
occupation, brighter because cleaner amuse- 
ments, other engagements, books, lectures, 
concerts, drives, walks, work, games without 
wagers, and athletic sports without betting, 
— all good and lawful rivals of the gambling 
dens, — must be put in the field. And, above 
all, we must show the young that short cuts 
are always the longest journeys, whether to 
wealth, knowledge, pleasure, or salvation. It 



BUSINESS AND MORALS. 127 

is like taking a serpentine path through some 
city park in the fond belief that it will take 
you across the lot more quickly than the 
straight road along the edge. The chances 
are that it will turn upon itself and bring you 
just where you were at the beginning. When 
men learn, as they commonly learn only too 
late, that the best of knowledge and wealth, 
and salvation too, is the " working it out," 
they will not wish to shorten the process. It 
merely defeats the divine method. But we 
are all like little children, who wish they were 
at their journey's end the minute they start, 
and lose the charms of travel along the way 
by fidgeting for the arrival. 

Is not this mood symptomatic ? And does 
it not lie at the root of the evils we are con- 
fessing and deploring in the business world 
to-day ? We want to get everywhere without 
going. It cannot be done. Work alone makes 
wealth, and the worker alone deserves it. 
Practice only can make perfect, and practice 
takes time and application. Only the puri- 
fied are pure, and the longest and strongest 
life is not long enough for our purification. 



128 BUSINESS AND MORALS. 

Patience must have her full time, if she is 
ever to have her perfect work. Rome was 
not built in a clay, and shall man take less 
time than a city for his fulfilment ? The 
quickest to start is often the first to stop in 
the race of life. Hasten slowly. Look be- 
fore you leap. One false move may cost you 
the game. 



VI. 

THE STAGE AND MOKALS. 



VI. 

THE STAGE AND MOEALS. 

Children sitting in the market-place. — Luke vii. 32. 

^)HE first actor was Satan. He 
played the part of the serpent 
in the garden of Eden. Since 
him there have been many, both 
good and bad, but none more skilful. If 
acting is making believe, or assuming a form 
and character not one's own, then all deceit is 
histrionic art, and " all the world 's a stage " 
in very truth. The technical stage, however, 
has the moral advantage over the world, of 
being open and above board in its deceitful- 
ness ; it tells its audience, to begin with, that 
it is going to cheat them. And they come 
to it for that purpose. Writers upon the 
drama are at much pains to trace its begin- 
ning to a remote antiquity, — the Hindoo 



132 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

plays running back for centuries before Christ. 
But the beginning of acting is further back 
than that. It is in human nature. Every 
child playing store-keeper or nurse is an 
actor. Imitation and imagination are the 
sources of the drama, and they are in every- 
body. Our surroundings may suggest the 
part we choose to play. The nursery mimics 
adult life. The child takes off the man. I 
have seen by the roadside, in the neighbor- 
hood of a large cemetery, an innocent child 
playing at grave-making. The grave-diggers 
in "Hamlet" were no more actors than the 
child. An instinct so primitive, a habit 
universal as this is, flowing out of imitation 
and imagination, cannot be eradicated. The 
stage in some form is as permanent as man's 
nature. 

It is very commonly believed that the 
church is opposed to the stage, that religion 
and the drama are at swords' points. And 
so they may be in particular cases ; but that 
there is any constitutional variance between 
them is not borne out by the history of either 
nor by the philosophy of either. 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 133 

The earliest plays are all religious, and in 
every country the drama was at first a vehicle 
of religion. Plays were enacted only on 
occasions of religious festivity, and their sub- 
jects were chosen from the Scriptures of the 
people who presented them. The Hindoo 
drama celebrated the adventures of Vishnu 
in one or another of his incarnations. The 
Greek stage was, first and last, profoundly 
religious. All its action turned upon the 
will and decrees of the gods. Our own later 
drama, the English, began in the miracle- 
plays of the twelfth century, which were en- 
acted by monks, sometimes in the churches 
themselves. When the trading companies 
took the control of them, they were still 
devoted to the illustration of the Scriptures 
or of the lives of the saints. They were 
played at the street corners, in little theatres 
on wheels, built with two stories, the lower 
occupied as a dressing-room, the upper as the 
stage. The plays which followed the miracle- 
plays were called " moralities." They were 
allegories of the conflict between good and 
evil. These are the beginning of the regular 



134 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

drama of a later elate. These were the prep- 
aration for that greater miracle, — the dramatic 
dispensation of the Elizabethan age. The 
passage from the one to the other was made 
by the introduction of interludes between 
the Scriptural scenes. In these interludes 
very real and very modern men and women 
w r ere represented. Thus in time the volun- 
tary eclipsed the "morality/' and the modern 
drama arose, full-grown and armed, from the 
cleft head of the church. 

It is worth knowing that when the Roman 
drama began to decay, its degradation was 
shown and provided for by the substitution 
of pantomime and dancing for language. 
When the body hints the meaning which 
the tongue is ashamed to speak, then the 
stage is on its downward path. Opera bouffe 
preludes the downfall of the opera gr<r,i<I. 
The church will oppose the one while it may 
encourage the other. Christianity was the 
foe and destroyer of the corrupt and corrupt- 
ing drama, as of the brutalizing gladiatorial 
games ; but she destroyed only to fulfil, for at 
a later elate, in the form of miracle-plays, she 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 135 

made the beginning of the modern stage. 
Nay, more, the church has preserved in her 
liturgies some of the elements of the drama, — 
the sacred allegory and symbol ; the pageant, 
the spectacle, the attitude and gesture, those 
appeals to the senses, which make up so much 
of the impressiveness and charm of the stage. 
The mass is a miracle-play, with priests and 
boys as actors and a hushed, auditory for its 
audience. Or when, in some liturgical church 
once or twice removed from Kome, you hear 
the strains of far-off music, and, as it comes 
nearer and clearer, the train of white-robed 
priests and choristers file in, what is this but 
the pageantry of the stage returning to the 
church which sent it forth, and offering at 
the altar the same sacrifice to sense and ar- 
tistic taste which is offered in the theatre ? 
If, therefore, any rebuke of the theatre is in 
order, let it not come from a church which 
owes very much of its fascination to the same 
appeal to eye and ear which makes the stage 
attractive. At least let such a church be sure 
that its own forms and symbols express a re- 
ality as real and an interest as commanding 



136 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

as that of the u pictured passions " of the 
stage. That at least holds the mirror up to 
man. The church, if it knows its calling, will 
be content with nothing less than the reflec- 
tion of the light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in its services ; and for this it will de- 
pend less upon that which is seen and tem- 
poral — the pageant and the show — than 
upon that which is unseen and eternal, — 
truth, life and love. 

With this brief genealogy of the stage, let 
us look at it as we know it in its standard 
authors and in the modern theatre. What 
is it, and how does it affect the moral char- 
acter of its lovers and followers ? 

Strange that its standard writers all belong 
to an earlier age than ours, and one so far 
inferior to the nineteenth century in science, 
knowledge of the world, the economic arts, 
and the means and luxuries of life. It is 
mortifying to our intellectual pride to have 
to seek the models of the classical drama in 
ancient Greece two thousand years ago, and 
of the English drama in the reign of Elizabeth 
three centuries away. Nothing greater than 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 137 

Sophocles or Shakspeare has yet appeared. 
Nothing approaching them seems probable. 
We know too much to do much. The very 
multiplicity of modern learning defeats crea- 
tive work. Or men know too many things, 
let us say, rather than too much. Our minds 
are like rag-bags ; they run to patch-work. 

Shakspeare's " little Latin and less Greek " 
nourished his mind without depleting it. He 
took life and books in the right proportion, 
and the result was new books with more life 
than quotations in them. 

What the drama is, no one is so well able 
to tell as he who was its acknowledged mas- 
ter. " Players," he says in the work of 
" Hamlet," " are the abstract and brief 
chronicles of the time." The end of play- 
ing, "both at the first, and now, was, and is, 
to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature ; to 
show virtue her own features, scorn her own 
image, and the very age and body of the 
time his form and pressure." What has been 
claimed for literature in general, that it is 
the retreat and hiding-place of the spirit of 
each age, from which, as from a phonograph, 



138 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

the very voice and song of the past may be 
heard again, is especially true of dramatic 
literature. There the manners and morals 
of the time step forth before the eyes of all 
men. Take the unexpurgated plaj's of Shak- 
speare, with all their vulgarities and obscen- 
ity, and you will find there a true image of 
the age in which he lived and wrote. The 
Globe Theatre, where his plaj^s were first 
acted, was the rudest of buildings on the 
banks of the Thames, so poorly planned and 
constructed that the people in the pit were 
exposed to the rain when the weather was 
bad, and the protected boxes were none too 
nice. Sign-boards took the place of scenery, 
the spectator having to supply the landscape 
out of his own imagination. An extra top- 
knot of feathers and a rose on either shoe 
were the leading players' sufficient distinction. 
The female parts were taken by boys; and no 
lady attended the theatre without wearing a 
mask. The rudeness of the audience and the 
place accounts for much that a nicer taste and 
finer auditory find disgusting in some of Shak- 
speare's plays. The only feature we are now 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 139 

considering in them is their mirror-like truth- 
fulness to human nature, according to the 
" forms, modes, and shows " of the Elizabethan 
age. 

These " forms, modes, shows " the actor can 
and does repeat, happy and great if he can 
fill them with the suggestion of that " within 
which passe th show." For that really is his 
business, — to make the speech, walk, posture, 
gesture, fashion, and habit of an age hint that 
common humanity which underlies all the 
ages. Hamlet, comparing the player's mock 
tears for Hecuba with the dulness of his own 
temper, asks : — 

" What would he do, 
Had he the motive and the cue for passion 
That I have 1 He would drown the stage with tears, 
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, 
Make mad the guilty and appal the free, 
Confound the ignorant, and amaze, indeed, 
The very faculties of eyes and ears." 

But we humbly submit that the actor who 
should thus forget himself would prove him- 
self a poor actor. He would be the very 
" robustious, periwig-pated," passion-tearing 
monster which Hamlet's soul abhorred. He 



140 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

would miss the modesty of nature ; " for in 
the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, 
whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire 
and beget a temperance that may give it 
smoothness." The stage-manager cannot be 
suffered to neglect his own rules, especially 
when they are true rules. And it may be 
easily proved that only he holds the mirror 
up to nature who represents men and women 
under some sort of self-restraint. Nobody in 
real life acts precisely as he feels. We all 
have our convenient masks and disguises. 
The cloak of conventionality covers a multi- 
tude of individual lines, angles, and tenden- 
cies, and the stage which would depict man 
must paint him with his mask on. Rarely, 
very rarely, does man, or the actor who truly 
represents him, break forth from his am- 
bush and give his native passion utmost play. 
Men, and the actors who best report them, 
show themselves mightiest in what they re- 
serve. They impress 3*011 as having that 
" within which passe th show." Now and then 
a great actor, in an exceptional moment, lets 
all his passion out 5 as when Salvini, in his 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 141 

unequalled personation of Othello, — a person- 
ation characterized in the main by marvellous 
grace, dignity, and self-command, — suddenly 
lets the tiger in him have full play, as he 
leaps upon lago in momentary suspicion of 
his falsehood, and almost wreaks the ven- 
geance he threatens. But this is exceptional, 
and only proves the strictness of the rule, 
that really great actors impress you as keep- 
ing back more than they express. It is this 
which saves them from rant on the one hand 
and tameness on the other. The language 
of Shakspeare is itself so impassioned and 
imaginative, not to say extravagant and un- 
bridled, that only a strong rider can use it 
without being run away with. I have heard 
Booth rant in " Macbeth " until the tragedy 
became pure comedy. What better, then, can 
be expected of lesser actors ? The poet is 
licensed to speak the language of hyperbole ; 
but the actor who recites his verse assumes 
the task of bodying forth the poet's vision. 
It is his to make the creature of the poet's 
imagination walk and live upon this solid 
earth. His flesh and muscle balance the 



142 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

poet's nerve. He is not set to outdo his 
author, but to weight his fancy with cor- 
poreal fact. The playwright, if he is skilful, 
has stretched the simple truth as far as it will 
bear stretching. Something of excess in size 
and freedom in grouping must be allowed 
where stage effects are to be produced. But 
all the more because the play is overdrawn 
should the acting be restrained. To see Ris- 
tori in " Medea," or Janauschek in the " Bride 
of Messina," is to see how full to the brim 
dramatic power may fill the poetic form with- 
out spilling the least drop. When, in the 
climax of her woe, the mother in Schiller's 
gloomy tragedy calls on the gods to do as 
they list, assured that nothing worse can 
come, the cry of the woman is as strong and 
deep as the roar of Niagara. Medea's visit- 
ing of her children's murder upon their faith- 
less father is like a stroke of lightning. Both 
of these women, in the sleep-walking scene in 
" Macbeth," show us what dreams may come 
in conscience-haunted sleep without over- 
stepping by a footfall the limits of nature. 
But how does all this, it may be wondered, 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 143 

bear upon the question 'we proposed to con- 
sider ? If one has nothing more to give than 
a history of the drama and an analysis of its 
theory and methods, he had better select some 
other place and occasion than the church and 
the day of worship, for the presentation of his' 
views. I agree with the objection, and hasten 
to justify our brief study of the drama con- 
sidered historically and intrinsically because of 
its real bearing upon the moral character and 
competency of the theatre. The drama be- 
longs to literature, and as such has its own 
laws. In obeying these it is fulfilling its func- 
tion as literature. If in addition to this it can 
serve the ends of morality, that is so much 
the better. If not, it is not deprived of its 
excellence as art. We must keep our dis- 
tinction in view here as in considering pic- 
torial and literary art. Truth to his chosen 
subject is all that art requires of the sculp- 
tor, painter, poet, novelist, or dramatist. And 
there is a moral element in the very truth of 
art to its subject, which we may not overlook. 
It is a part of perfect veracity, and therefore 
admirable from a moral standpoint, however 



144 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

objectionable in itself the subject treated may 
be. Take a popular instance. Few modern 
plays have been seen by so many peo- 
ple, and so thoroughly admired for the per- 
fection of their presentation, as " Rip Van 
Winkle." I need not recall the story or re- 
state the plot. Everybody knows it, at first 
or second hand, and almost everybody has 
seen the leading character, as it has been 
immortalized by the genius and study of its 
famous representative. Whatever we may 
think of the moral value of the play, — and 
opinions will differ about that, some men 
thinking that it carries the sympathies of the 
audience with the careless drunkard rather 
than with his hard-working wife, and others 
feeling that the retribution of a lost life is 
penalty enough for offences so genial, — not 
attempting to settle these differences, let us 
fix our eye for a moment on that incident 
near the close of the play, which is made 
so significant and telling by the actor ; 
namely, the taking of a glass of wine which 
his wife offers him, notwithstanding the mis- 
ery and loss his intemperance has caused him. 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 145 

Undoubtedly the temperance advocate and the 
moralist, pure and simple, would say that the 
man should have refused the wine. It had 
been his ruin, and he knew it ; the least he 
could do was to let it alone. I have been 
told that Mr. Jefferson tried the effect of 
refusing this glass, at one time, and gave it 
up, because it did not play w r ell or please his 
audience in that shape. Now which of these 
two ways is better ? The moralist, who looks 
only at the immediate issue, will say : " Re- 
fusing the cup is better." The temperance 
moralist will not admit a doubt of it. But 
I am sure the artist, the dramatist, with the 
instinct of truthfulness to the character, would 
say : " He must take the cup." There is 
nothing converting in a twenty years' nap. 
This man is what he was when he fell asleep. 
He must act as he would have acted then. 
And after watching the effect upon my own 
mind, feeling as keenly and sorrowfully as 
I could all the misery and wrong of this man's 
intemperate ways, I am ready to say that I 
think the artistic sense is the true sense in 

this case, and that the moral lesson conveyed 

10 



146 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

by this truth to character, this dramatic ve- 
racity, is all the stronger, because the way of 
the special reformer has not been taken. Let 
us be fair to the stage in this matter. "We 
may blame it for its choice of subjects if we 
will, but never because, having chosen its 
subject, it paints him to the life. It is nothing 
less than lying to take a villain and either 
soften him down or paint him over to suit 
the nicer taste of a moral and critical audi- 
ence. Still worse offence to put moral laws 
and temperance lectures on his lips, when 
the man he represents could never have com- 
mended virtue in any other fashion than the 
Spartan's drunken helot commended temper- 
ance, namely, by showing the disgusting effect 
of intemperance. 

There are certain offences against the peace 
and purity of domestic life and good society 
which the world's best civilization has at last 
succeeded in putting out of sight. No decent 
people refer to them, even if they know of 
them, and it is needless to say that nobody 
who is notoriously guilty of them is cordially 
admitted into the best society. Now I do 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 147 

not see why a custom so general and justi- 
fiable in our social relations with one another 
should not be extended to the domain of art, 
and why we should not demand of the artist, 
novelist, and dramatist that he keep to the 
same wholesome rule in the selection of his 
subjects and in his treatment of them. If 
rogues, murderers, rakes, courtesans, and deb- 
auchees are to figure in the legitimate drama, 
then keep them in the background. We 
know the dramatic necessity for a deep-dyed 
villain. Every play must have him as a foil 
to its hero or heroine. But there is a choice 
among villains, and we prefer a clean one. 
Let the dirty beasts in the human menagerie 
of which the stage makes a show, appear in 
solitary confinement. At least let that drama 
which professes to hold the mirror up to vice 
and virtue as they shape and show themselves 
in human society to-day, be true to the de- 
cent reservations of modern civilization, and 
simply suggest without flaunting its grosser 
sins. Unhappily for our age, the nation 
which has succeeded best in giving dra- 
matic literature its necessary brilliancy, speed, 



148 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

directness, passion, presence of mind, and in- 
tensity is the one which either knows least of 
moral distinctions or cares least for them in 
connection with art. French plays and their 
translation and imitation have won the lead, 
and for our generation at least they seem 
likely to keep it. The French have no word 
in their language corresponding to our word 
" home." It is sometimes said that they have 
not the thing it describes. If their favorite 
plays are a true picture of their manners and 
morals, we might freely say that they do not 
deserve to have. Such repeated and pro- 
longed trifling with marital fidelity as these 
plays exhibit must either be the result of the 
thing they depict, or a fertile cause of it. 
Oddly enough, while altogether too kind to 
the offence, French society seems merciless 
to the open offender. Not the sin, but the 
stupidity of letting it be discovered, seems to 
be the unpardonable thing. The only social 
fault known in these circles is awkwardness. 
Blunder is crime. In one of the plays of this 
too much followed if not wholly approved 
school, Camille, the heroine, extenuates her 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 149 

frivolous and abandoned life on the ground 
that society has put her profession as actress 
under its ban. She had once the opportu- 
nity, and tried to use it, of entering good 
society as a lady; but as soon as it was dis- 
covered that she had been an actress society 
turned its back upon her ; so she turned her 
back upon society. Hence the wasting and 
wasted life. 

What I wish to note in the play is the in- 
genuity with which the heroine is placed 
in a strait betwixt two sins, and then raptur- 
ously applauded because she refused one sin 
and took another. She had one lover whose 
love she honestly returned ; and she lied to 
him and ran away with another man. Where- 
fore ? Because she feared she should blast 
her lover's fortunes, and offend and injure his 
family if she married him. And this you are 
compelled to see and admire in the heroine 
of the play, if you are cajoled into going to 
see it. I know not what Truth has done 
to these playwrights and novelists of the ro- 
mantic school in France, to make them so 
indifferent to her claims. Victor Hugo plays 



150 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

us the same trick in " Les Miserables," when 
he gets our sympathies all aroused for Jean 
Valjean in his hard fight for virtue and free- 
dom, and then puts him into an extremity 
from which nothing can save him but a false- 
hood. If the falsehood had been his own 
it might have been less shocking, for he was 
a fugitive from prison and at war with the 
State, and war has its privileges. But to 
make Sister Simplice, the saintly woman 
whose whole life had been a struggle for 
truth and honesty, — to make her, even when 
on her knees in prayer, tell two lies in suc- 
cession : first that Valjean was not in her 
house at that time, and second, that he had 
not been there on that day, when he was con- 
cealed in the very room with her as she was 
speaking, — to make this holy woman lie be- 
tween one Ave and the next, as the only way 
of saving her friend from arrest, and to make 
her falsehood a sort of passport to heaven, — 
a French passport, — this is the topmost reach 
of the romantic school. In this dizzy eleva- 
tion of romanticism, Camille and Sister Siin- 
plice, the courtesan and the saint, go up in 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 151 

the same balloon. It is no fault of Victor 
Hugo's or Dumas' if they do not reach the 
empyrean together, and both for telling lies. 

After getting flushed and headachy and 
generally demoralized by such company, what 
a moral tonic one finds in turning to the 
" Heart of Mid-Lothian," and hearing Jeanie 
Deans' brave though perilous truth-telling, 
or in taking up Goethe's " Iphigenia," in 
which the sweet, strong piety of Sophocles, 
and his perfect art, seem for a brief space to 
revisit the earth, — Iphigenia, who braved the 
anger of a king for truth's sake, and saved all, 
her own, her brother's, and her lover's lives, 
when she seemed to have sacrificed all by 
telling the truth. 

If Christian France and England cannot do 
better for us than in their society dramas of 
the present day they have been doing, we 
shall be drawn back to heathen Greece and 
Rome. The stage seems all given over to 
the rendering of man's brutality and woman's 
frailty. If there is any one institution which 
lies at the foundation of social well-being, it 
is holy matrimony ; and the modern stage 



152 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

seems to take a peculiar satisfaction in doing 
what it can to loosen its ties and jeopardize 
its binding obligations. Why reputable peo- 
ple, who would feel the presence of an aban- 
doned woman in their society as a personal 
outrage, should flock to do homage to a bril- 
liant representation of such a character upon 
the stage is a puzzle. But they do it, and 
half the time their hearts are cajoled into 
a sympathy and admiration even of the very 
character which should arouse their reproba- 
tion. A silly wife deserts a good husband for 
a bad lover, is overtaken in her flight, swoons 
away for fear her husband will hurt her lover. 
— which he does temporarily in the process 
of killing him, — and then the play ends with 
a graceful dying scene on the part of the 
heroine herself, the husband begging her for- 
giveness. For what? That is the question, 
she being the person at fault. 

This briefly is the plot of a typical and 
very popular French play, " Frou-Frou," and 
the most gifted artists compete in rendering 
its leading role. It makes one sigh for the 
austere and awful tragedies of iEschylus and 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 153 

Sophocles. The crimes of GEdipus and Jocasta 
were their fate. The crimes of these people 
are their choice. 

We must not allow ourselves to be cozened 
by this " evil and adulterous" literature into 
a false impression of the age in which we live. 
I believe there were never so many or so 
happy homes in the world as now ; never 
so few offences against them, though too 
many and too grievous still. Out of a really 
large acquaintance, if my whole past life 
is taken in review, I can truly say that 
I know, or have known, very few husbands 
and wives who wished they had married 
otherwise. Their partners are like their own 
selves. Time and acquaintance have shown 
them that there is no perfection on either 
side of the house ; but, for all that, they are 
true, patient, hopeful, and attached each to 
each, and they have the same respect for 
their partners which they have for their own 
souls. Without altogether approving of either, 
they would not change with anybody else. 
This is the world as it is, and the stage 
maligns it when it paints it differently. 



154 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

I do not envy, — much as I enjoy good 
acting, — I do not envy the haUtuSs of the 
theatre, if they are compelled to see and hear, 
with all the glamour of rich upholstery and 
regardless dressmaking, this endless serio- 
comico-ludicro-trasrico tale of love-making, at 
the risk of one's life and the certain loss of 
one's soul or character. I would not peril 
the sensibility of my nerves and sympathies 
in any such dram-shop of the heart or opium- 
den of the conscience as the theatre thus 
employed deserves to be considered. The 
man or woman who exposes himself repeat- 
edly to its blinding and deadening influences 
becomes a kind of moral quicksilver, on which 
you can make no imprint, and whose slippery 
particles defy your attempt to compress or 
pick them up. Or, if you prefer the figure, 
he is like an old piano, drummed out of tune 
and sensibility, and only capable thereafter 
of making ridiculous the themes it once made 
noble. 

I wish there were time and this were the 
occasion to take the world's greatest play, — 
Shakspeare's " Hamlet/' — and let it tell us 



THE STAGE AND MORALS. 155 

what the stage is capable of; just where its 
powers and their limits are, — how it may teach 
all virtues, without preaching one ; track the 
human spirit in its highest flight and deepest 
fear; glass alike the natural and that which 
passes nature ; be true to life and yet be true 
to art ; romantic and yet real ; a very extrava- 
ganza in speech, and yet thought-freighted 
from keel to deck, and ballasted beyond all 
fear of overthrow from too much sail; no 
moral purpose, yet full of moral impressive- 
ness. To my thinking this play not only 
holds the mirror up to the special character 
and scenes it depicts, but it holds the mirror 
up to every man who looks upon it and tries 
to read or act it. Hamlet is every man's 
touchstone. It tells his character by the 
character he finds in it. 

Mr. Furness has collected in one volume 
the criticisms and interpretations of over a 
hundred writers and actors, leading thinkers 
of Europe and America; an<J I engage to 
recognize each interpreter — at least if I 
know his other writings — by the character 
he puts upon Hamlet. To Booth he is 



156 THE STAGE AND MORALS. 

always the melancholy Dane, all nerve and 
feeling, irresolute because dreamy, scholarly, 
and impractical. To Fechter he is a ruddy, 
yellow-haired son of the North, witty, reso- 
lute, capable, and quite likely, when over- 
heated by exercise, to show himself " fat and 
scant of breath." Thus the actors disagree, 
each following his own temperament. To 
Voltaire he is a barbarian ; to George Mac- 
Donald a moral hero, only irresolute because 
conscientious. " He must have ground more 
relative " than his suspicion or the ghost's 
revelation before his purpose of revenge can 
take effect. And so we might go on tracking 
the whole company by their interpretation 
of this one great character and play. 

And is not this an example of the mission 
of the stage, — to show to man what is in his 
own heart, by unpacking the heart of typi- 
cal and representative characters ? In this 
mission of self-discovery and mutual revela- 
tion, it has a calling of the highest value 
and importance. It is alike vain and foolish 
to deny or to decry it. We have seen how 
native to the heart the drama is, springing 



THE STAGE AND MORALS.. 157 

up in the instinct of imitation and the noble 
faculty of imagination. We have seen how- 
it lay on the breast of religion and drank its 
milk from her fountain ; we have followed it, 
in its variable career, now the glory and now 
the shame of its mother ; and we have seen 
how capable it is, when at its best, of thrilling 
lessons to the heart which enter but slowly 
through the solemn doors of the reason and 
the conscience. The church should court the 
alliance of the stage, not repel or disown it ; 
for we may depend that sooner or later the 
character of the audience makes the color 
of the stage. And we can only raise its 
standard by giving our own hands in ready 
applause of what is good in it, or the slow- 
moving finger of scorn at what is base. 



VII. 

THE PRESS AND MORALS. 



VII. 

THE PEESS AND MOBALS. 
Some new thing. — Acts xvii. 21. 

i^^^^HE Athenians who, as Paul de- 
i : lHlSl' bribed them, had leisure for noth- 
JtelH [ ins; else "but either to tell or to 
hear some new thing," correspond 
to the newspaper subscribers of the present 
day. They want the news. They love 
novelty. Anything for a change. The Greek 
lived on excitement. His mercurial tempera- 
ment craved variety. Living in the very 
focus of the world's civilization, in a country 
whose natural bays and harbors invited the 
commerce of all maritime people, familiar 
by travel and warlike expedition with other 
lands, rich in the traditions of conquest and ex- 
ploration, the descendants of Herodotus and 
Alexander came fairly by their curious, enter- 
prising, quick-witted, gossiping character. 

11 



1G2 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

This Grecian spirit, which has such interest 
in the new, is nothing to be ashamed of. It 
is the source of all progress, invention, dis- 
covery. The charm of novelty is as legiti- 
mate as that of antiquity. It is pre-eminently 
a grace of youth. Only the aged or the pre- 
maturely old live in the past. Youth lives in 
the present and reaches out for that which is 
to come. Historically one of the oldest nations 
of Europe, Greece is always young. She has 
the gifts and the faults of youth, its volatility 
and its freshness. The Athenian's interest in 
the new did not wean him from the old. His 
standard authors, painters, and sculptors be- 
longed to the past ; but their faces, like his 
own, were towards the future. Paul on Mars 
Hill had a more hopeful audience, with all 
its idolatry, than he found in Jerusalem. If 
Jerusalem was the most holy, Athens was the 
most newsy city of antiquity. And it should 
be remembered that it was Athens, not Jeru- 
salem, which first became Christian. 

When the angels sang the advent of Christ, 
they called their message " Glad Tidings ; " 
and no better title of the gospel has been 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 163 

found than " Good News." It might without 
untruth or irreverence be claimed that the 
first manuscript of the New Testament was 
the first newspaper. It was the earliest sheet 
on which was written the good news of God. 

But, keeping within the limits of the subject 
we have proposed, the newspaper proper, it 
is said that the first newspaper published in 
Europe was the " Gazetta " of Venice. It 
was written and read aloud at various places 
about the city, to inform the people about 
the war with the Turks in 1 536. In England, 
it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that 
news-selling became possible and profitable. 
Near the end of the sixteenth century the 
newsdealers issued little pamphlets contain- 
ing extraordinary intelligence. 

" Wonderful and strange news out of Suffolk 
and Essex, where it rained wheat the space of 
six or seven miles." " Lamentable news out 
of Monmouthshire, containing a wonderful 
and fearful account of the great overflowing 
of the waters of said county." You smile 
over these items from the English press of 
the year 1583 ; but I can match the credulity 



164 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

of those simple folk, who believed in a rainfall 
of wheat, almost any day in our papers. Take 
the story of that singular finding and losing 
of a ten-dollar gold-piece by the same person 
every year on the same day, with the start- 
ling suggestion that there is something very 
mysterious in this. Take the absurd report, 
nevertheless true, from our mountain regions, 
that certain farmers refuse to sell their sweet 
milk for fear it w 7 ill dry up the cows. As to 
the " fearful and wonderful " account of " the 
great overflowing of the waters," what else 
have we had in our papers for the last ten 
weeks ? The press has always had a craving 
for the mysterious and the tragical. When it 
cannot find new instances, it republishes the 
old, or invents a ghost story or an accident. 
It is nothing if not startling. It lives on 
murder if not hj it, and men's calamity is its 
opportunity. The cyclone that sweeps a vil- 
lage off the face of the earth, as a house-maid 
might remove an ant-hill, fills the sails of the 
daily paper and calls out an extra edition. It 
revels in war, flourishes on bloodshed, thrives 
on riot, grows fat on famine, healthy on 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 165 

pestilence, full with crime, merry with volup- 
tuousness, sparkling with scandal, witty with 
personality, confident with party triumph, 
saucy with patronage, rich though making 
many poor, or poor while making many rich. 
The press is the residuary legatee of that ill 
wind which blows nobody good. 

In one of his contributions to the "Tatler " 
(No. 18), Addison, himself a journalist, pays 
this exquisitely humorous tribute to the sen- 
sational newsmonger of his day. At the close 
of a war he says : — 

" Another gentleman I am much concerned for, 
the ingenious fraternity of which I have the honor 
to be an unworthy member ; I mean the news- 
writers of Great Britain, whether postmen or 
postboys, or by what name or title soever digni- 
fied or distinguished. The case of these gentlemen 
is, I think, more hard than that of the soldiers, 
considering that they have taken more towns and 
fought more battles. They have been upon par- 
ties and skirmishes when our armies have lain 
still ; and given the general assault to many a 
place when the besiegers were quiet in their 
trenches. They have made us masters of several 
strong towns many weeks before our generals 



1GG THE PRESS AXD MORALS. 

could do it, and completed victories when our 
greatest captains have been glad to come off with 
a drawn battle. Where Prince Eugene has slain 
his thousands, Boyer (author of the ( Political 
State ') has slain his ten thousands. This gentle- 
man can indeed be never enough commended for 
his courage and intrepidity during this whole war : 
he has laid about him with an inexpressible fury ; 
and, like the offended Marius of ancient Rome, 
made such havoc among his countrymen as must 
be the work of two or three ages to repair. . . . 

" It is impossible for this ingenious sort of man 
to submit after a peace ; every one remembers 
what shifts they were driven to in the reign of 
King Charles the Second, when they could not 
furnish out a single paper of news without light- 
ing up a comet in Germany or a fire in Moscow. 
There scarce appeared a paper without a paragraph 
on an earthquake." 

Then Addison introduces Mr. Dyer, whose 
favorite sensation was whales, having brought 
three into the river Thames in five months ; 
and the judicious and wary Ichabod Dawkes, 
who " got himself a reputation from plagues 
and famines ; by which in those days he de- 
stroyed as great multitudes as he has lately 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 167 

done with his sword. In every dearth of 
news, Grand Cairo was sure to be unpeopled." 

The rise of the newspaper was the death 
of literature. At least the two were coinci- 
dent in time. Lecky, in his history of Eng- 
land in the eighteenth century, says that it 
was not prolific of the higher forms of litera- 
ture, but the influence of the press was great 
and growing, although periodical writing was 
far less brilliant than in the preceding period. 
Was not this due to the growing interest in 
news for its own sake, rather than in the 
literary form or sauce in which it might be 
served ? 

It had taken England a hundred years to 
achieve a comparative freedom for her press. 
Her government undertook to say how much 
her people should know of the world's doings. 
" Butler's Weekly News from Italy and Ger- 
many," which was the representative London 
newspaper of 1622, seems to have won and 
deserved the derision which was poured upon 
journalism by Ben Jonson in his "Staple of 
News." He describes, with ridiculous com- 
ments, the opening of an office for news, or 



168 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

the newspaper stand, — "a place of huge 
commerce it will be/' where "staple news" 
may be purchased. " No other will be cur- 
rent." It seems to have been sold by persons 
licensed by the government. A country wo- 
man visiting the city is represented as coming 
to the news-store and saying : " I 'd have, sir, 
a groat's worth of any news, I care not what, 
to carry down this Saturday to our vicar." 

In 1641, the Star Chamber being abolished, 
the press became more free and began to 
influence public opinion. But in 16G2 the 
government monopolized the press. Its free- 
dom, such as it has had, dates from 1682, and 
with its freedom began its increase ami its 
power. The press cannot live in chains. Cage 
it and you kill it. Like the pulpit, it only 
flourishes when there is no let or hindrance 
to the full expression of a man's real convic- 
tions. In 1702 the first daily paper in Lon- 
don, the " Daily Courant," appeared, printed 
on one side of a half sheet of paper. Twenty 
years later, there were three daily and five 
weekly papers there, and ten which came out 
three times a week. In the middle of that 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 169 

century every important town had a paper. 
Two hundred half sheets a month were issued 
in London, and as many elsewhere. They 
were the " chief channels of amusement and 
intelligence." " The people of Great Brit- 
ain are governed by a power/' says Mr. 
Danvers, as quoted by Lecky, " never heard 
of as a supreme authority in any other age, — 
the government of the press." 

The passage from the puerile and slavish 
press of the seventeenth century to the pow- 
erful press of the eighteenth, the recognized 
fourth estate of the country, was made by 
such writers as Defoe, Swift, Steele, and 
Addison. The " Tatler " and "Spectator" 
mediated between an age of literature and 
one of news. They are curiously compounded 
of both. No such compound is likely to prove 
successful again. To our minds, accustomed 
to read the news of the day in telegraphic 
sentences of ten words each, with no hint of 
poetry or permission of ornament about them, 
the graceful descriptions of the warlike doings 
of the Duke of Marlborough or Prince Eugene, 
which emanate from St. James' Coffee-House 



170 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

in the pages of the " Tatler," would be tor- 
ture. Nor can I imagine a newspaper reader 
of to-day lingering over his breakfast to read 
the sometimes charming, often wearisome, 
elegancies of writing which make up the 
pages of these old literary journals. They 
exactly suited the taste of their day, and 
doubtless mitigated the political animosities 
of the time with their mild diversions. Their 
object was not political agitation, but social 
reform. They aimed to " furnish entertain- 
ment that pleased the imagination without 
offending the sense of decency or the re- 
ligious instincts." The " Spectator," which 
succeeded the " Tatler," sought to establish 
" a rational standard of conduct in morals, 
manners, art, and literature." I think it was 
Taine who said of Addison that he made 
morality fashionable ; a sentence that re- 
minds one of the shrewd comment of Dr. 
Chapin, of New York. " In New York," said 
he, " it is the fashion to go to church, and I 
take advantage of it to try to do the people 
a little good." So great was the popular- 
ity of the " Spectator " in its day, that the 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 171 

morning meal in London was considered in- 
complete without it. A servant, on being 
asked by her master if breakfast was ready, 
replied that the food was prepared, but the 
" Spectator " had not arrived. 

From Addison's day onward the newspaper 
grew more and more newsy and political, and 
less and less literary and moral. And to-day, 
in spite of the boundless proportions which it 
has put on, so that no subject is too high and 
no enterprise too difficult for it to undertake, 
the press at large is still distinguished by its 
especial interest in politics and news, rather 
than in literature and morals. The former are 
its vocation, the latter its avocation. When it 
means business, it deals in news and politics. 
Books and homilies are the contributions of 
its Easy Chair. They are the engagements 
of its leisure hours. Parties, advertisements, 
despatches, and telegrams are its stock in 
trade. There is something in the necessary 
rapidity with which most newspaper work is 
done which precludes literary nicety. The 
paragrapher must take the word which comes 
first, whether it is the very best word for the 



172 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

place or not. He must take the shortest cut 
to the thought he wishes to put, without 
staying to dally like a meandering stream 
with the willows and weeds of literature. 
By the necessities of the case his vocabulary 
becomes limited and popular, like that of the 
masses whom he addresses, not exact or ele- 
gant. Thus it happens, that those who only 
read the business statistics and leading arti- 
cles of the newspapers, lose their literary 
taste and judgment. 

Nor is exclusive newspaper reading, or 
the reading of that which is most charac- 
teristic in it, especially helpful to morals. 
The motive of the paper modifies its matter ; 
and when the controlling purpose is novelty 
and party success, — as it is with most news- 
papers, — then something is lost to morals as 
well as literature. When I find my daily 
paper in its propria persona, that is, in the 
editorial column, frankly saying that i: a con- 
viction standing in the way of the success of 
its party does not amount to much," then I 
see that I must seek elsewhere for the moral 
tonic which I need. But you may say that 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 173 

this is not a fair representation of newspaper 
morality ; you may summon me by mighty 
names and high examples to acknowledge the 
moral power of the press. I grant the possi- 
bility of such power. I am speaking now of 
its probability; the actual moral effect of the 
average newspaper, which finds its especial 
calling in collecting news and serving its 
party. The temptation, on the one hand, as 
Tattle says in Jonson's play, " to credit all, 
and make more of it in the reporting," is far 
too great for the professional news-gatherer ; 
while, on the other hand, there are so many per- 
suasions — bread-and-butter persuasions, place- 
and-office persuasions, ease-and-good-fellowship 
persuasions — to fidelity to party, right or 
wrong, that it takes a really great editor 
to withstand them. There have been such. 
They are the glory of journalism, — men who 
were capable of independent and honest con- 
victions, and who dared to stand by them. 
The press has had its martyrs and sufferers 
for liberty and the right of private judgment, 
as well as the church and the state. The. 
history of journalism has many noble pages 



174 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

of tyranny braved and shamed by faithful 
censorship of kings, parliaments, ministers, 
and princes. 

I find a moral invio-oration also in reading 
the story of the origin and successes of such 
papers as the London " Times " and the New- 
York " Tribune," each at one time or an- 
other, in its respective country, touching the 
highest- water mark of circulation and influ- 
ence. In both there has been from the be- 
ginning a sturdy determination and capacity 
for independence, which lay at the root of 
their influence. When the manager of the 
" Times," the second Walter, exposed the 
delinquencies of Lord Melville, without fear 
or favor, well knowing that his family would 
lose the lucrative government printing in 
consequence, and w r hen he virtuously refused 
all reparation for his losses lest he should 
compromise the perfect independence of his 
paper, he showed of what stuff an editor may 
be made, and laid the foundation for that su- 
preme influence which his paper has wielded 
in the later history of England. And when 
Horace Greeley, in 1841, after a wholesome 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 175 

discipline of struggle and failure, and a half 
success which seems like failure compared 
with his later triumph, started the New York 
" Tribune," he took ground which he never 
deserted, and which made his paper a power 
second to none in the eventful developments 
of the present century of American life. In 
his earlier paper, the " New-Yorker," seven 
copartners withdrew from him in five and a 
ialf years. " You don't humbug enough," 
they complained. " You ought to make more 
noise and vaunt your own merits. The world 
will never believe you print a good paper 
unless you tell them so." " Our course," says 
the editor, " has not been changed by these 
representations." And in introducing the 
•first number of the " Tribune," he says : " We 
hope to issue a fair sheet, unembittered by 
the violence of party, untainted by the breath 
of licentiousness." How well he succeeded is 
attested by the great English commoner, John 
Bright, who declared in the House of Com- 
mons that there was no better paper in Lon- 
don. " Here," said he, " is a newspaper 
advocating great principles, and conducted 



176 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

in all respects with the greatest propriety, — 
a newspaper in which I find not a syllable 
that I might not put on my table and allow 
my wife and daughter to read with satisfac- 
tion." Originally that paper employed about 
twenty persons. In 1871, when a review of 
its fortunes was given to the public, it had 
from four to five hundred engaged in each 
issue. Its total cost the first week was five 
hundred and twenty-five dollars. In 1871 it 
was nearly twenty thousand dollars a week. 
I find some of its old numbers most' instruc- 
tive reading at the present time, and in other 
circles than those first favored with its peru- 
sal ; for example, the editor said years ago 
that he asked " no free-trader to forego his 
economic views in order to be of his party." 
And he insisted that no protectionist should be 
" bullied out of his convictions in deference to 
the harmony of the party." Nor can I read, 
without wishing to repeat, that wise warning 
which he read to his old associates, when he 
told them that " the attempt to base a great, 
enduring party on hate and wrath, was as 
though you should plant a colony on an ice- 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 177 

berg which had somehow drifted into a tropi- 
cal ocean. " 

If the testimony of a successful journalist 
may be allowed to have weight in defining 
the province of a newspaper, it may be found 
in these words of Horace Greeley : " The idea 
is to embody in a single sheet the information 
daily required by all those who aim to keep 
posted on all important occurrences ; so that 
the lawyer, the merchant, the banker, the 
forwarder, the economist, the author, the poli- 
tician, may find here whatever he needs to 
see, and be spared the trouble of looking else- 
where." 

In the two examples now given of successful 
journalism, — the " Times " in England and 
the " Tribune " in America, — there is the 
evidence we were seeking, that it is both 
possible and, in the end, profitable, for an 
editor and a paper to have and to hold con- 
victions of justice and right, which are dearer 
to him than any party, and which he will 
hold to and defend, through good report and 
evil report, in sickness and health, in sor- 
row and joy, till death doth reveal in the 

12 



178 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

light of God's judgment their error or their 
truth. 

Profoundly studied, this will be seen also 
to be the life and success of political parties. 
If they ever thrive it is due to some power 
or principle in them which the people feel to 
be just. In the long run, no party carries 
the votes which does not carry the heart and 
conscience of the people. It is the weakness 
of politics to-day that no commanding moral 
issue is raised, or none whose moral bearing 
can be readily seen and felt. If in this flat 
interim of party warfare, in which " keeping 
in" on the one side is pitted against " getting 
in" on the other, some man or some paper 
or some company of men would set up a 
clean and clear piece of justice and rally the 
people around that, there might yet be some- 
thing worth working for and voting for in the 
land. We would humbly suggest that such 
a fair distribution of wealth and ordering of 
society that every man in the country might 
" sit under his own vine and fig-tree " would 
make a good party standard. If we were 
tempted to enter journalism, we would take 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 179 

that for our standard, and do what we could 
to bring it about. 

I sometimes please myself imagining this 
new journal, the " Vine and the Fig-tree,'' 
sheltering under its shade the small farmer, 
the daily workman, the modest trader, the 
toiling millions, and taking the best se- 
curity against communism and anarchy, by 
making every laborer a property-owner, 
and so pledging him to order and respect 
for "mine and thine." A roof of his own, 
a home of his own, however humble, ought 
to be within the reach of every hard-work- 
ing man in America. If he is prospered, 
a cow and an apple-tree, or their equiva- 
lent, might be added. And I believe that 
this simple platform, with the legislation, 
agitation, sacrifices, and labor needed to 
bring its prophecy to pass, would be the 
making of the man or party that espoused 
it, and the greatest possible blessing to 
mankind. 

At present, as it seems to me, the most ap- 
propriate place in which any political party 
could appear in its newspapers would be in 



180 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

the column of wants. " Wanted : A just prin- 
ciple around which to rally, and some men of 
convictions to lead us on." 

We have seen something of the infancy 
and growth of journalism in our brief review 
of its history in England, where it has risen 
from the " Daily Courant " of London, printed 
on one side of a half sheet of paper in 1702, 
to the London " Times " and its able contem- 
poraries. Mr. S. C. Hall, in his " Recollections 
of a Long Life," puts the number of news- 
papers now published in the United Kingdom 
as 1,986. In our own country the increase of 
the journal in numbers and influence has been 
far greater. In 1720, when James Franklin 
began to print the " New England Courant," 
there had been but three newspapers in this 
country. His brother Benjamin says that 
James was advised by his friends not to 
start another paper, it being considered that 
one newspaper was enough for America. To- 
day, or at the time of the latest census, 
there were 11,314 periodicals published in 
this country. Of these 971 were daily pa- 
pers, 8,G33 were weeklies, and 1,167 were 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 181 

monthlies. The circulation of the daily pa- 
pers was 3,566,395, and that of the week- 
lies was over twenty-eight millions. At the 
time of the Ee volution', says McMaster, there 
were forty-three newspapers in the country, 
all of them in large towns, and rarely travel- 
ling more than fifty miles from their editor's 
door. They were not received by the post- 
office as mail. The post-riders had to be re- 
warded for carrying a dozen newspapers in 
their portmanteaus (a custom of which I 
have been recently reminded, by receiving 
a summons to apply at the post-office for a 
parcel too large to be delivered by the post- 
man : it was a small package of newspapers). 
These newspapers of Revolutionary times 
were very modest affairs, never exceeding 
four pages, and usually appearing thrice a 
week. They had no editorial. Printer and 
editor were one. Payment was received in 
country produce. Scraps ; advertisements of 
runaways ; news by the last packet from Lis- 
bon or London ; " a note to the editor, post- 
ing some enemy as a coward in abusive and 
scurrilous language ; " rude woodcuts ; a 



182 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

poet's corner, with only less fame than that 
of Westminster Abbey ; now and then a book 
review ; and, best of all, occasionally a really 
standard book reprinted in successive numbers, 
— these made up the substance of the paper. 
Lampoons, epigrams, anecdotes, and coarse 
bon-mots furnished the spice for this pudding 
literature. There was nothing in the papers 
concerning really significant events happening 
in their time at a distance from them ; for 
there were no means of getting prompt ac- 
counts of such transactions. Quotations from 
private letters were the principal authorities 
of that day. But when we consider that 
letters sent out from Philadelphia spent live 
weeks in going a distance now traversed in 
a single afternoon, we see how stale the 
news must have been on its arrival at its 
destination. As the light from a remote 
star which takes several years to reach our 
eyes affords no evidence that the star is 
still in existence, so news so tardy was no 
assurance that its source was not destroyed. 
In some country districts the post-rider was 
an old man, who took his time and his ease 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 183 

in delivering the mail, knitting woollen socks 
and mittens as his horse jogged along. This 
was the mail service of a nation which now dis- 
tributes more mail-matter in New York in one 
day than it distributed throughout the coun- 
try in a whole year one hundred years ago. 
And this is the press which to-day has " her 
ambassadors in every quarter of the world, 
her couriers upon every road." 

Not content with penetrating the heart of 
the dark continent, and revealing Africa to 
the world with greater clearness than she 
knows herself, or piercing to either pole to 
interview its silent icebergs and frozen seas, 
the press of to-day undertakes the more diffi- 
cult enterprise of exploring the mind and 
heart of every leading man of the time, and 
opening a northwest passage through the sel- 
fishness, reserve, and heartless accumulations 
of moneyed kings and capitalists. What it 
does not know, it frankly says, is n't worth 
knowing. But the same may be said of very 
much that it does know. For one, I do not 
care to know all that my daily papers can tell 
me. It takes a strong mind to survive its 



184 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

acquisitions. Most men are the victims of 
what they read or hear. I do not see how 
any but the most able and disciplined minds 
can safely know all the paper tells them. 
Such multiplicity and incongruity is the 
death of consecutive thinking. The mind 
is like a hunted elephant under this daily 
charge, and turns now to the man and now 
to the dog that assails him, always beaten, 
because always diverted before it reaches 
its foe. 

Skilful readers know how to skip ; and busy 
people are compelled to set limits to their 
reading. For all that, every man in America 
must have his paper. He cannot live with- 
out it. It is well. Only let him take it as 
he takes his dinner, with choice and discre- 
tion, not attempting to try everything that 
is on the bill of fare, nor to eat all there is 
of every course. There is such a thing as 
temperance in newspaper-reading as well as 
in eating and drinking;. I have to confess 
that I sometimes meet people who are sadly 
inebriated by their papers. They have lost 
their heads, and parted with their divine right 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 185 

of free inquiry and independent judgment. 
Their wisdom is not theirs, but their neigh- 
bor's, and their wit is only the repetition of 
his jokes. Among so many papers there is 
room for choice. Unhappily, however, every- 
body wants the local news, and it is not every 
locality which can furnish him with good read- 
ing. A good rule is to read the best of local 
papers for its home news, and to rely upon 
some standard metropolitan paper for the 
world at large. The founder of the New 
York " Tribune," after saying that no man 
is even tolerably informed in our day who 
does not regularly keep the run of events 
and opinions through the daily perusal of at 
least one good journal, adds : " What its 
character should be must depend on his own 
taste ; though if he should prefer a sheet 
surcharged with calumny, scurrility, and ma- 
lignity, — the mere instrument of faction 
and the offspring of low ambition, — he will 
give us leave to wonder rather than admire. 
There are hundreds of newspapers printed 
in this country (and the case is still worse in 
England and elsewhere) which habitually vio- 



186 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

late all the decencies of life, and indulge in 
language and temper which cannot be thrown 
in the way of children without injury to their 
manners, their morals, and their principles." 
It is this consideration which makes us pause, 
before we pay our whole measure of admira- 
tion to the public press. Its enterprise amazes 
us. The diligence, self-sacrifice, and hard 
work, turning night into day ; the ability, 
industry, and intelligence shown in its writ- 
ing, collecting, and discriminating; the high 
pressure under which its articles are pre- 
pared, as well as printed ; the good nature 
with which it meets the great army of bores, 
idiots, and fools that beset its office ; the 
public spirit it commonly displays, lending 
its introduction and countenance to every 
good cause — but who can enumerate the 
uses and abuses of the press ? It is always 
easier to show the latter than the former, 
and often they who find most fault are those 
who receive most service from the paper. 

I do respect and hold in high esteem 
the calling of journalism and the manner in 
which it is often followed. But just because 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 187 

it is so far-reaching and so powerful, it ought 
to be held to a high standard of behavior. 
The model of the community must be its 
superior. And I cannot accept as the func- 
tion of the press or the secret of respectable 
journalism, the realistic picturing of every- 
day humanity, in all its vileness as well as 
its virtue, in all its warning degradation as 
well as its exemplariness. At least, if the 
bad must enter, let not the press intro- 
duce them with jocoseness and demoralizing 
levity. Heaven knows that suicide, conjugal 
infidelity, drunkenness, crime, murder, and 
debauchery are no jokes to those who suffer 
from them ; and who that feels his oneness 
with society escapes such suffering ? I would 
have the paper that performs its task of re- 
porting new crimes, as well as better news, 
do it with the same reserve and decency with 
which its editor would speak of such things 
in the presence of his wife and children. 
That is where his paper is going, and he 
ought to dress it for the best society it enters, 
not the worst. The people who read and 
support newspapers in this country are those 



188 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

who have had some advantages of education. 
They are not the lowest of mankind, and they 
have a right to have their better characters 
and tastes respected in the paper that enters 
their doors. I suppose every decent person 
will admit that he would promptly show a 
man the door who ventured to talk at his 
table or in his parlor in the way in which 
well-esteemed journals lying on his table 
speak of current crimes and indecencies. 
What is the difference between talking smut 
and printing it ? I can see none that is not 
in favor of the former ; for the printer has 
time between the thought and the writing, 
printing, and publishing to think better of it, 
while the speaker is often betrayed into his 
error almost unawares. Much is said and 
something is clone to keep our children a way 
from corrupting literature. We have already 
considered together, in this course of lectures 
on Life and Morals, the question of juvenile 
reading and juvenile morals. But, barring 
the illustrations, which do greatly aggravate 
the offence of the text, I question if many 
of the publications of the " Police Gazette " 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 189 

company surpass the shamelessness of repu- 
table leading papers in this country. In 
fact, many of those publications are made up 
of newspaper reports of notorious tragedies 
and court trials, with nothing added to them 
but the illustrations. Do not think that I 
am approving these publications. I am only 
including in a common condemnation with 
them the better-dressed corrupters of our 
children's morals, which go unchallenged 
from house to house. There are scandalous 
books that have reached their hundredth 
editions freely sold everywhere to-day. But, 
bad as they are, they are no worse in open 
or covert vulgarity and indecency than court 
reports of the modern thorough-going news- 
paper. Ben Jonson's estimate of the press 
in 1622 is almost repeated in Bulwer Lytton's 
modern play of " Money." One of its char- 
acters says : — 

" Aye, read the newspapers ! they '11 tell you 
what the world is made of. Daily calendars of 
roguery and woe. Here, advertisements from 
quacks, money-lenders, cheap warehouses, and 
spotted boys with two heads. So much for dupes 



190 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

and impostors. Turn to the other column : po- 
lice reports, bankruptcies, swindling, forgery, and 
a biographical sketch of the snub-nosed man 
who murdered his own three little cherubs in 
Pentonville. 

" Do you fancy these things but exceptions to 
the general virtue and health of the nation ? Turn 
to the leading article, and your hair will stand on 
end at the horrible wickedness or melancholy 
idiotism of that half of the population who think 
differently from yourself. 

" In my day I have seen already eighteen crises, 
six annihilations of agriculture and commerce, four 
overthrows of the church, and three last, final, 
awful, and irremediable destructions of the entire 
constitution. And that 's a newspaper ! " 

Making clue allowance for the extravagance 
of the picture, is it not true to one side of 
journalism, and a side very frequently turned 
towards the public ? Who shall defend our 
hearts and homes from the insidious demorali- 
zation of prurient plays, novels, and news- 
paper scandals ? The clime novels are not 
the only offenders. Nickel newspapers are 
often just as bad. An outrageously bad 
paper gets tabooed ; but under cover of 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 191 

keeping its readers posted as to the news of 
the day, it is getting ruinously common for 
leading papers all over the country to chron- 
icle, to the last syllable of their infamous de- 
tails, cases of murder, violence, incest, and 
debauchery. And as if the length and 
breadth of the land, with its daily renewed 
crimes, were not field enough for such damag- 
ing enterprise, foreign countries are canvassed 
for their scandals as they are for their rags, 
and out of these two the sensational columns 
of the papers are largely made up, — only 
with this difference, that the rags are cleansed 
before they are turned into paper, and the 
scandals are not. " An evil and adulterous 
generation seeketh after a sensation," for this, 
I take it, is what was meant by a sign in the 
ancient day. The press undertakes to give 
them what they seek. We all read the papers 
because we do not wish to be " behind the 
times," as we say. But when the times be- 
come perilously fast, it may prove an advan- 
tage to keep behind them. 

Lamar tine prophesied that " Journalism 
would be the whole press before the end of 



192 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

this century. Thought will not have time to 
ripen and accumulate into a book. The bock 
will arrive too late. The only book possible 
from this date is a newspaper." It has not 
come to that as yet ; nor will it, unless the 
press shall not only multiply its calling, but 
magnify it. General knowledge has been 
well defined as general ignorance ; and the 
very omniscience of the press will make it too 
shallow for deep sailing. After all, every 
shop, though it be a variety store, has its 
peculiar line of goods ; and the press, with 
all its variety, still runs to news and politics. 
People will go to it for these things. But 
when they want real and independent studies 
of great subjects, they will seek them as be-' 
fore, in the best books and reviews ; and when 
they feel the need of moral tonic and spiri- 
tual quickening, they will go to church, the 
reform convention, or to standard literature. 

The newspaper is extempore printing, as 
the stump is extempore speaking. Both are 
mighty for the moment. The evil they do 
" lives after them, the good is oft interred with 
their bones.' ' The press was declared by 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 193 

one of its most successful editors, the elder 
Bennett, to be the living jury of the nation. 
But, like other juries, it is sometimes packed. 
And I believe, whatever men may think to- 
day of trial by jury, that they think still less 
of trial by newspapers.' The editorial mind, 
compelled to make itself up at short notice, 
is as much too prompt with its verdict as the 
ordinary jury is too slow. Moreover, there 
is as much difference between papers as be- 
tween jurors. Some of the former, as well as 
the latter, have not been superior to a bribe. 
Mr. Bennett, writing from Europe in 1847, 
says that the "columns of the Paris press are 
regularly sold in favor of any kind of specu- 
lation, theatrical, financial, or political, the 
price being regulated on the same principles 
which rule the price of beef or mutton." 

Leigh Hunt says that puffing and plenty 
of tickets were the system of the day in Eng- 
land, when he introduced a real criticism of 
the stage into the " Daily News." So long 
as a suspicion of these things hangs about the 
press, whether in special cases it be just or 
not, its judgments will be cautiously accepted. 

13 



19-4 THE PRESS AND MORALS. 

The only way of pure influence for it is to 
stand in its own shoes and owe no man any- 
thing but to love and serve him. " No paper 
can very much help a cause which has to be 
helped by it," said the second Franklin. His 
own success and that of the editor of the Lon- 
don " Times " lay in their uncompromising in- 
dependence. Oh that men, editors, and leaders 
of their fellows would dare, more of them, to 
have convictions of truth and right, and stand 
by them until they brought other men to their 
side ! That way lies honor, usefulness, ser- 
vice, and the best success for the press. In 
that way already have the honorable triumphs 
of the press been made. Let no man diminish 
those honors or undervalue those triumphs. 
In the working out of that freedom to which 
the English-speaking race has attained, the 
services of a brave and fearless press have 
mightily contributed. It is not too much to 
speak of it, as its historian has done, as the 
fourth estate. Names famous in the per- 
manent literature of the race are associated 
with its service, — Milton, Defoe, Swift, Addi- 
son, Steele, and Johnson, of an earlier gen- 



THE PRESS AND MORALS. 195 

eration, and too many and too familiar names 
of our own time to need mention. Its free- 
dom has at once illustrated, accompanied, and 
secured the freedom of the people. Wher- 
ever independent papers flourish, there liberty 
flourishes. Witness England and America, 
in contrast with Russia and Turkey. Alive 
to her great opportunity to shape the thought 
and character of her innumerable readers, 
conscious alike of her power and her respon- 
sibility, proud and sensitive to every en- 
croachment upon her independence, as eager 
to tell what is true as what is new, prov- 
ing all things and holding fast to that which 
is good, the press may be second to no other 
institution in its beneficence. It will redeem 
the noble promise which, I well remember, 
through all my boyhood's years, stood on the 
titlepage of the paper that found its way into 
my home. And if that modest sheet was not 
so large, not so noisy, not so cosmopolitan, 
not so full or so fulsome as the papers I after- 
wards read in the larger cities, it never told 
me anything I was ashamed to know, or low- 
ered my opinion of the humanity to which 



190 THE PRESS AXD MORALS. 

I belonged or the country which I loved to 
call my own. This was its motto, worthy to 
lead the ambition and endeavor of the press 
of the whole land : — 

" Here shall the Press the people's rights maintain, 
Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain. 
Here Patriot Truth her glorious precepts draw, 
Pledged to Religion, Liberty, and Law." 



VIII. 

■ 

THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 




vni. 

THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

Despise not prophesyings. — 1 Thess. v. 20. 

KE ACHING is improving conversa- 
tion conducted by one. I dis- 
covered this by attending at one 
time what was advertised as a 
conversation by Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. I 
found that nobody spoke but Mr. Alcott, and 
that he preached. From what has been told 
us of Coleridge, I should call him also a 
preacher. He did all the talking in every 
company of which he formed a part. Carlyle 
preached in the same way at times, though 
at less length. The man who, under moral 
or religious impression and fulness, monopo- 
lizes the conversation, is a preacher. 

If it be said that the man who can do this 
must be an egotist and a bore, we answer, 



200 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

that while the egotism or self-forgetfulness, 
whichever it be, may be admitted, he need 
not of necessity be a bore. If he can speak 
more fully, wisely, and movingly than the 
rest of the company, and really express their 
thoughts better than they would be likely to 
speak them, and acid to them good thoughts 
and impulses of his own, he is a really edify- 
ing person, and should be encouraged to 
speak on. This view of preaching, although 
not as high-sounding as more common presen- 
tations of the preacher's office, carries several 
consoling implications with it. It calls, for 
example, for the conversational form and 
tone in preaching, instead of the profes- 
sionally oratorical or dramatic. It puts the 
speaker upon the direct road to his purposed 
end, whatever it may be. It rubs so much 
of the oil of nature into the man's speaking, 
that it has some of the pliancy and charm of 
fireside conference. It makes the discourse 
logical, continuous, and connected, — what 
follows bearing some obvious relation to what 
precedes, — and encourages the reasonable 
and persuasive, rather than the dogmatic and 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 201 

dictatorial tone. It recognizes and respects 
the individuality of the hearer or silent part- 
ner in the conversation, and appreciates his 
real participation in the colloquy of mind 
with mind and heart with heart. Moreover, 
it puts a prompt quietus upon that vociferous 
style of pulpit address, that halloaing to sin- 
ners, which so painfully suggests the possi- 
bility of the speaker himself being lost, or at 
least not quite out of the woods. Dr. Lyman 
Beecher came home one Sunday from church 
in a very low state of mind, declaring that 
his sermon had been a failure. " Why, 
father,'' replied his little son Henry, " I 
never heard you preach so loud in all my 
life." "That is it!" said the doctor, "I 
always halloa when I have n't anything to 
say." 

The Latin word sermo, from which is de- 
rived our word sermon, comes from a root 
which means " connected or bound together." 
It was applied to various forms of speaking, 
but chiefly of well-ordered discourse. Cicero 
uses it to describe speaking " as opposed to 
bawling or screaming," — that is, speaking 



202 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

with the voice rarely raised above a moderate 
pitch. And Horace is quoted as using this 
word to describe his Epistles and Satires, — 
compositions of a conversational rather than 
a highly poetical character. 

The foremost preacher of America, in his 
lectures on preaching, pleads for conversa- 
tional naturalness in pulpit speaking. " I 
have often heard ministers in private conver- 
sation, and said to myself, i Would to God 
you would do so in the pulpit ! ' But the 
moment they are in the pulpit they fall into 
their scholastic, artificial style." He also de- 
fines the province of preaching as well as it 
can be defined. " It is the art," he says, " of 
moving men from a lower to a higher life, — 
the art of inspiring them toward a nobler 
manhood." 

Whenever, then, one man among many, 
out of real love, interest, and religious ful- 
ness, takes up the conversation and carries it 
on, asking of the others only their silent atten- 
tion, the responses of their concurrent think- 
ing, and the free and suggestive comment of 
their expressive faces, and thus encouraged 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 203 

holds out to the end of a continuous, per- 
suasive, well-ordered, and culminating dis- 
course, there is preaching. Its end is moral 
and spiritual uplifting. Its substance is truth, 
given with conviction. Its vehicle is speech ; 
its agent a speaker. In its ideal estate, its 
subject-matter will be true, its agent will be 
good, its vehicle convenient, and its effect 
will be moral and spiritual elevation and 
advance. 

With such high matter and calling, it 
would seem that there would be no room for 
anything but eulogy of the moral influence 
of the pulpit. And this would be the case 
if the actual always reached the ideal. That 
it does not, and has not always done so, is a 
part of the common imperfection, in which 
the pulpit and the preacher have to take 
their share. 

I propose to treat the subject of the Moral 
Influence of the Pulpit practically and histori- 
cally, not ideally ; to look at it as it is ; to 
ask what it has done in past ages, and what 
it is doing now ; and I shall, in each divis- 
ion of the subject, inquire what is (1) the 



204 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

substance, (2) the person, and (3) the effect 
of the prophetic office. 

That very word " prophetic " tells us where 
to look for the beginning of preaching. The 
prophet was the first preacher. The two 
names stand for the same person. The limi- 
tation of the prophetic idea to prediction is a 
limitation in our understanding rather than 
in the word. Predication is as much the 
prophet's calling as prediction. To divine 
the meaning of the past, and set it forth in 
visible form and fresh colors, is as real 
prophecy as to foretell the coming of Elias. 
To elucidate experience is as great a service 
as to formulate hope. In truth, the one is 
not far different from the other. The lamp 
that guides the patriot's feet in his bold 
pioneering of futurity is the lamp of experi- 
ence. To-morrow is only the other side of 
yesterday, like the two faces of a coin. The 
same metal and meaning, if not the same 
impress, are in both. The preacher and the 
prophet, the predicator and the predicter, are 
one. 

And what more glorious ancestry could the 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 205 

preacher have than the ancient prophet ? He 
was the reason of all progress. The keeping 
qualities are with the priesthood ; but the 
saving powers are the prophets. The hie- 
rarchy conserves the existing order, good or 
bad. It dreads nothing so much as change. 
The prophet knows that there are times when 
there is no way of saving but by losing. The 
form must go in order to keep the substance. 
The mould must break in order to release the 
statue. Who that had his choice would not 
rather be descended from Moses the prophet 
than Aaron the priest ; from Samuel than 
Eli ; from Elijah than Azariah ; from Isaiah 
than Urijah ? And this is the noble ancestry 
of the preacher. He is in the line of the 
prophets. " The epochs of the world's moral 
life," says a modern writer, " have been 
epochs of popular preaching." And he jus- 
tifies his statement by illustrious examples 
from the times of the prophets until now. 
Those Hebrew prophets, as he shows us, 
" have ministered more to our worship than 
any other class of men ; and if they con- 
tributed nothing to ecclesiastical forms, to the 



206 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

sanctity of the altar or the pomp of the 
ritual, they gave that earnestness of con- 
viction, hope, and love, without which altar- 
form and ritual are worse than unsubstantial." 
John the Baptist came preaching. Jesus 
preached. The day of Pentecost was a day 
of preaching. Paul was the prince of preach- 
ers. The fathers, Tertullian the brazen, and 
Chrysostom the golden-lipped, were trumpet 
and bugle to a church falling asleep in cere- 
monialism. Peter the Hermit was the prophet 
of the Crusades. The preaching friars of Saint 
Dominic, let loose upon an unthinking church, 
and addressing every man in his own tongue, 
awoke the reason they were set to quiet, and 
recalled Pentecost. They prepared the way 
for the Keformation. The bold and homely 
prophecies of their successors anticipated 
Luther, and prepared the way for Savonarola. 
They spoke as men to men, and feared not 
the faces of kings or priests. Oliver Maillard 
being threatened by the courtiers of Louis 
XII., because he opposed the edict of Tours, 
replied : " As you please ; it is as convenient 
for me to go to Paradise by water as by land." 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 207 

Poncet, being rebuked by the Duke of Eper- 
non because he made people laugh in his 
sermons, replied boldly : " I would have you 
know that I preach only the word of God, 
and I have never in my life made as many 
laugh as you have made cry." A preacher 
before the council of Sienna, in the fifteenth 
century, declares that the "bishops, in the 
matter of luxury, outdo Epicurus. Over their 
cups they discuss the authority of pope and 
council." And he tells the story of Saint Bri- 
gitta, who, in a trance in the church of Saint 
Peter at Rome, saw the building suddenly 
filled with mitred hogs. " These," replied 
the Lord to her astonished inquiry, " are the 
bishops and abbes of this generation." 

Of such metal as this were the preachers 
who led the way to Martin Luther. And in 
him and his successors, Protestantism has 
proved itself a prophetic church in contra- 
distinction from the priestly and sacerdotal. 
If it is true to its genius and traditions, it will 
maintain this emphasis upon preaching as the 
enlivening office of the church. It agrees 
with Paul when he says : " I had rather speak 



208 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

five words with my understanding, that by 
my voice I might teach others also, than ten 
thousand words in an unknown tongue." 

Of the substance of very much of this 
old-time preaching, we of to-day could not 
honestly say much in praise. It does not 
touch us much more nearly than would an 
unknown tongue. For unknown thoughts, 
unfamiliar and uncongenial modes of con- 
ceiving and presenting truth, are even more 
repellent than meaningless sounds. The 
latter may be musical at least, and, by asso- 
ciation with sacred scenes and places, acquire 
a significance to the heart. But sermons of 
which we know the meaning of every word, 
and yet feel no sort of interest or faith in 
anything they teach, are dull reading and 
profitless hearing. They stupefy the mind ; 
they do not edify. They are like water 
slowly trickling over stone. You can trace 
them by a sort of green or black ooze, — 
the lowest form of vegetable life, — which 
gathers in their pathway. I believe ser- 
mons such as they do more harm than good. 
They only stain the minds they have 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 209 

neither the force to channel nor the depth 
to flood. But in reading old-time sermons, 
we must allow for the old times. The 
early settlers in New England, as they 
were marching in pursuit of the Indians, 
stopped on their way to discuss foreordi- 
nation. To them such topics were as excit- 
ing and moving as they are passionless to 
us. Moreover, we miss in our reading of the 
discourses that come down to us out of the 
scholastic, metaphysical, dogmatic, and ultra- 
scriptural ages, the power of the preacher's 
personality. It is like a spent rocket, this 
ancient sermon we pick up ; and we wonder 
how listening thousands could have gathered 
round to hear Whitefield deliver it, or how the 
agitated hearer of Jonathan Edwards could 
have pulled his coat, to stay the torture of 
his consuming rhetoric. Nevertheless such 
was the power of these preachers in their day. 
Their subject-matter, incredible or unimpres- 
sive to us, was the moral tinder of their time, 
and when the lively spark of their personal 
influence fell upon it, the fire burned. Add to 
these elements of power the high esteem and 

14 



210 THE PULPIT AND A/ORALS. 

authority in which the pulpit stood in times 
past, — 'an esteem and authority not depend- 
ent as now upon inherent truth and worth, 
— and you will realize how influential it has 
been in the preaching epochs of Christianity. 
Preaching and prayer are the universal 
offices of religion. They are possible in all 
lands and in all places. They do not need 
water, as in baptism ; or bread, as in the 
Lord's supper ; or holy garments, as in the 
mass ; or consecrated places, as in all forms 
of temple-worship ; or a separate priesthood, 
or a special altar, or animals of sacrifice. 
They are the light-armed warriors of the 
spirit, and go conquering where heavier 
forces cannot travel. They pitch their taber- 
nacle beside all roads, and sow their seed 
beside all waters. They have been mighty 
agencies in the past in kindling thought and 
training minds, in moving hearts and shaping 
characters, in inspiring reform and instruct- 
ing consciences, in removing wrongs and es- 
tablishing the right, in comforting sorrows 
and ministering to resignation, in gently 
breaking new discovery to ancient ignorance, 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 211 

and mediating between the new and the 
old ; and in leading a progressive human- 
ity slowly and safely up the steps of its 
moral and spiritual advance. 

But here the man who has gone with us 
agreeably in our retrospect of the preacher's 
calling and influence, may stop and refuse to 
go further. " To-day," he may say, " all is 
changed." Stripped of his merely professional 
authority, dependent upon the voluntary sup- 
port of the people, rivalled by other powerful 
and lively agencies of reform and education, 
— the press, the public school and library, 
the lyceum, and quite distanced by the stage 
in popular favor, — the pulpit of to-day will 
tell a different story from that of its past his- 
tory. The modern pulpit, men will declare, 
is the publishing house. People turn now to 
literature, periodical and standard literature, 
for their instruction and quickening ; and the 
question is gravely mooted in thoughtful 
circles to-clay, " Will the coming man go to 
church?" 

We have considered together in recent 
preachings, or conversations on these subjects, 



212 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

what the actual and possible benefits of the 
press, the stage, and general literature are ; 
and you may remember enough of the evi- 
dence collected to moderate your faith in 
their sufficiency as substitutes for a direct 
moral agency, like the pulpit. The stage 
may be a moral influence, but need not be 
in order to fulfil its artistic calling. The 
press also was found to have no call to 
preach. As for books, common literature, 
they are of all kinds, and are often made to 
sell. If preaching and the pulpit may not 
stand, then conscience will lose its spokes- 
man, and morality the only agency which, 
in being true to itself, must of necessity be 
true to her. The pulpit believes. The stage 
makes believe. The press makes others be- 
lieve. The first alone is the vantage ground 
of truth and righteousness. It has convic- 
tions ; and woe to it if it conceals or hushes 
them ! The whole force and power of the 
preacher lies in his veracity and earnestness. 
He believes, and therefore speaks. The stage 
has just the contrary make-up. Its business 
is to impose on its audience. Mrs. Mo watt, in 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 213 

her autobiography, reports her fellow-actor in 
a most pathetic play, as calling for an um- 
brella when the audience were melted to tears. 
They were smiling while the people wept. 
Garrick said that the difference between the 
actors and preachers of his day was that the 
former uttered falsehood as if it were truth, 
and the latter uttered truth as if it were 
falsehood. I use the bon-mot only to justify 
my definition of the actor out of his own 
lips, — " The actor utters falsehood as if it 
were truth." 

But the preacher needs just the opposite 
qualification for his work. He is nothing, if 
not sincere. Goethe, in his introduction to 
Faust, makes one man say to another : — ■ 

" I 've often heard it said, the preacher 
Might profit with an actor for a teacher." 

To whom the other answers : — 

" Yes, when that preacher is an actor, granted, 
As often happens in these modern days." 

If the preacher ever really assumes the 
actor's part, he resigns his office and loses 
his church, although he may for a season 



214 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

double his audience. A preacher turned ac- 
tor in the pulpit means a worshipper turned 
spectator in the pew. " The hungry sheep 
meanwhile look up and are not fed." 

And what can the press do for them ? As 
we just said, its business is to make others be- 
lieve what it says. It may be true, it may be 
false, but it is what the editor wishes the peo- 
ple who read his paper to believe. He and 
his party have certain measures to carry, cer- 
tain men to elect to office, certain ends to at- 
tain, good, bad, or indifferent, and he uses his 
paper to serve those ends. In doing so, he 
is not departing from any recognized stand- 
ard of the newspaper press. But the preacher 
who should thus use his pulpit or utilize his 
position for any personal ends or party tri- 
umphs, irrespective of their right or wrong, 
would betray the trust imposed in him by 
his people and degrade his high office. As 
for literature in general, the very best of it, 
when looked at as literature, acknowledges 
no indebtedness to make men better. It 
aims to instruct for the truth's sake, not for 
the reader's ; to entertain for the joy of the 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 215 

game, not for the moral invigoration of the 
playmate ; and even when a book is writ- 
ten with character-buildjng as its avowed 
end, and an earnest purpose to lift man to 
a higher manhood, it is nothing but a book 
after all. It has no mobile face, no beaming 
eyes, no persuasive tones, no voice, no speech, 
no first person, no individual electric battery, 
making the very air its vibratory track, and 
setting the hearts of men a'clicking with re- 
cording and responding beats. There is no 
blood in a book. It is at best an apology for 
the preacher's absence. Paul cannot come 
at the present time, so he sends the Corin- 
thians a letter, — an excellent substitute, such 
letters as these, but nevertheless a substitute, 
not Paul in person. Nothing can take the 
place of the preacher; and, in fact, nothing 
does take his place. 

People who are in literature as a calling, 
and so busy in it that they seldom get an 
inside view of the church, are quite sure that 
the world at large is as inattentive as they 
are to the pulpit and the preacher. But the 
fact, as the figures show, is all the other way. 



216 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

The churches in this country and the church- 
goers more than keep pace with its marvel- 
lous growth in population. In 1800 there 
were 3,030 evangelical societies in the United 
States. In 1850 there were 43,072; in 1870 
there were 70,148; and in 1880 there were 
97,090, an increase of thirty- two fold in eighty 
years. The number of communicants in these 
churches has increased from 364,872 in 1800, 
to 10,065,963 in 1880. Meantime the Roman 
Catholics have increased (chiefly by immigra- 
tion) from 100,000 in 1800, to 6,367,330 in 
1880. Or take the money test : these same 
evangelical churches raised $745,718 for for- 
eign missions in the decade from 1810 to 1819. 
Between 1870 and 1880 they raised for for- 
eign missions $24,861,482 ; and for home 
missions $31,272,154, as against $233,826 
in 1820-29. Meantime, the value of the 
church property of these churches has risen 
from $71,275,909 in 1850 to $271,477,391 
in 1870. Somebody must believe in preach- 
ing besides the preachers, to make these 
figures good. 

The generosity, faith, and self-sacrifices 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 217 

which such statistics prove, ought to be re- 
warded by the very best of preaching. The 
people, at least, have a right to expect that 
the agency which they maintain at such an 
immense cost, and with so much patience of 
faith, shall do much to improve the characters 
of men, and thus help to maintain a high 
social state. This is its calling, as we agreed 
at the beginning, to " inspire men toward a 
nobler manhood." And I believe that this 
calling is quite as earnestly and successfully 
followed, on the whole, as any of the serious 
occupations of life. If preachers fall below 
the mark of their high calling, let it be re- 
membered that their calling is enough higher 
than others to give their attainment the lead, 
whether they reach the perfection of their 
vocation or not. A comparative failure in a 
high attempt is better than success on a lower 
plane. The traveller who reaches the Col de 
Balm on his way to Mont Blanc, though he 
rises no further, gets higher than the lake 
tourist who only sails from Geneva to Vevay. 
I make no apology for preaching or preachers. 
They hold their own very well in this mediocre 



218 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

world. Few who criticise them would do 
better under like conditions, least of all the 
litterateurs who think to write themselves up, 
by writing the pulpit down. The truth is, the 
world would give more for an honest shake 
of the hand, awkwardly as it may be given, 
than for the most graceful touch of the hat, 
which the most finished gentleman can exe- 
cute. And the earnest purpose to make men 
better, the serious attempt to persuade them 
to live more thoughtfully, the affectionate in- 
terest which all real ministers have and show 
in their people, are accepted of them and 
valued by them, and made to cover a thou- 
sand blemishes in their literary or oratorical 
work. 

If I allow myself to offer any criticism 
upon the moral influence of the pulpit, it 
will be for the sake of perfect candor, and 
not from any lack of faith in the office or 
respect for the men who so devotedly and 
laboriously fill it. It is the one business 
which has the moral and spiritual elevation 
of men for its end. In other professions 
this is incidental. To the preacher it is 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 219 

primary and ultimate, the Alpha and Omega 
of his endeavors. Other callings may achieve 
greatness, though missing this ; missing this, 
the preacher loses all. 

Keeping this grand effect in view, — the 
lifting of man from a lower to a higher life, — 
it is fair to say that both the substance of 
preaching and the person preaching should 
be morally sound and true. The profession 
which has manhood for its end must have 
men for its agents. No mastery of the art 
of speaking, or possession of outward graces, 
or acquirement of a lucrative living, or act of 
official indorsement, no laying on of hands 
or laying in of goods, nothing short of or less 
than personal character and first-hand right- 
eousness, can be accepted in a preacher. You 
have heard of the preacher who preached so 
well that when he was in the pulpit men 
wished he would never leave it ; and whose 
daily life was so bad that, when he left the 
pulpit, men wished he would never enter 
it. Such instances are possible, although they 
are not common. They show us one fatal 
opening through which the moral influence 



220 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

of the pulpit may be destroyed. I will not 
say that the character of the preacher must 
be above suspicion, — that may not be pos- 
sible in a suspicious community, — but I do 
say that it should be so high as to furnish no 
just occasion for reproach, and so truly good 
that in the end it will need no vindication 
but time. 

Mr. Spurgeon, in his lectures to his stu- 
dents, quotes Bishop Eeynolds as saying : 
" The star which led the w T ise men unto 
Christ, the pillar of fire which led the 
children unto Canaan, did not only shine, 
but go before them." 

And next to a consistent life, I would put 
honest thought as a requirement of the 
preacher. He has no right to preach, or be 
understood to preach, what he does not be- 
lieve. I am not blaming here the free and 
poetical use of language, that verbal symbol- 
ism which makes so much of the beauty of 
literature and the charm of eloquence. Let 
us have all you can afford to give us of this 
speech of the heart and the imagination, only 
let us have it in its proper form and place. 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 221 

In homilies, consolations, confessions, prayers, 
hymns, and aspirations, by all means, give us 
words that bloom and thoughts that sing. 
But there is one region, and that the very 
region which the pulpit has very much fre- 
quented in the past, in which this tropical 
use of language is not only out of place 
but out of truth. It is the realm of the in- 
tellect and understanding. There, language 
undertakes to be exact. Doctrine is not 
poetry, and dogma is not song. It is in 
vain, when you have ceased to believe your 
creed, to set it to music. It becomes then, 
in very reality, a mere song. No, there is 
a place and room for exact thinking in re- 
ligion, and there is a phraseology of much 
nicety which befits such thoughts. When 
men preach doctrine or dogma, they should 
express themselves in its appropriate terms, 
and then stand or fall by them. I cannot 
think it anything less than mental dishon- 
esty for men to accept, as true statements 
of their religious opinions, articles and creeds 
whose language has long ceased to represent 
their convictions. The position taken by 



222 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

so good a man and liberal an ecclesiastic as 
the late Dean Stanley, that one could as- 
sent to the thirty-nine articles, as a whole, 
without believing in any one of them sepa- 
rately, seems to me morally insane. And 
what that American bishop meant, or who 
he was, who wrote to Dean Stanley to stand 
by the national establishment of the Church 
of England to the u moral death" I cannot 
imagine. And let me acid to the moral char- 
acter and mental honesty, which are as gun 
and carriage to the preacher's charge, one 
word as to the truth and character of that 
rendering of the Christian gospel which is 
most popularly and, if I may coin a word, 
rcvivallfj preached. I refer to the crude and 
morally faulty renderings of the great mystery 
everywhere manifested, by which suffering 
innocence pleads with and for the wilfully 
disobedient. The supreme instance, — the 
Cross of Calvary, — in its atoning, sacrificial 
aspect, is made the sole motive of repentance 
and warrant of salvation by many preachers. 
In doing so, they often, as it seems to me, 
make shipwreck of morality. 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 223 

You may have heard of the way in which 
a wealthy layman once kept the ten com- 
mandments. He had them engraved on tab- 
lets, and presented them to his church. It 
was shrewdly hinted at the time that a more 
careful keeping of them in the conduct of 
his life would be a grateful sacrifice to the 
community. Men may say what they will of 
this witty device for keeping the decalogue ; 
it is quite as respectable, morally considered, 
as the popular view of meeting the require- 
ments of the moral law by the merits of Jesus 
of Nazareth. I have listened to a preach- 
ing of the substituted righteousness of Jesus 
Christ, which has as clear and explicit a 
statement of his sufficiency to replace by 
his righteousness what is lacking in the sin- 
ner, as it is possible to put into language. 
The preacher, Mr. Moody, undertook to weigh 
his audience with the ten requirements of the 
decalogue, each commandment serving as a 
separate weight. It was no difficult matter 
to convict every person in the immense con- 
gregation of having broken one or another 
of these laws \ especially when the preacher 



224 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

took the New Testament interpretion of mur- 
der, lust, and filial unfaithfulness. If evil 
thoughts and desires are culpable, as well as 
evil deeds, — and this is Christian teaching, — 
no man living can escape the condemnation 
of broken law. 

I have no word of objection or opposition 
to the pungent, earnest, and truthful way in 
which the revivalist put the requirements of 
the ten commandments. He convicted us 
all of sin. I am not sure but a retentive 
memory and sensitive conscience, applying 
Christ's rule of guiltiness in so much as de- 
siring; a wrong thing, would have made us all 
guilty of every sin forbidden in the decalogue. 
But that would not be necessary in order to 
bring us where the preacher aimed from the 
first to bring us, — before the presence of God, 
conscious of having broken His laws. The 
father making an idol of his child, the woman 
making amusement and fashion her first care, 
the man so hating his neighbor that he wished 
him dead, the thief, the covetous man, the 
unlawful desirer, the Sabbath-breaker, — as 
those familiar figures passed in review before 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 225 

us, did we not recognize in their faults our 
own, and confess that we had sinned and done 
evil in God's sight ? The most effective por- 
tion of the preaching, where the preacher 
fell upon that man or woman who would 
suffer his parents to want when he could re- 
lieve them, or treat with disrespect the love 
which had watched over his infancy and 
guided and supported his youth, was as whole- 
some a burst of moral energy as I have ever 
listened to. If this were to be a report only 
of another man's preaching in place of my 
own, I would like to take up in detail the 
teaching of this strong sermon on the deca- 
logue, and give you the benefit of it. But I 
should wish to stop before the closing and 
really consummate paragraph. When the 
preacher had weighed us all in the balance 
and found every man wanting, not excepting 
himself, he suddenly exclaimed : " And now 
you will ask me, how shall I make up for my 
light weight, — how shall I make the opposite 
scale go up, when I step into God's scales ? 
I will tell you. Jesus will step in with me, 
and that will fetch up the weight. He, the 

15 



226 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

sinless one ; he who has never broken the 
law ; he, my substitute, my king, my all, — 
he will step in with me, and then the weight 
will kick the beam." 

In words of which these are the very copy 
or exact equivalent, he preached the doctrine 
of a substituted righteousness, — that doc- 
trine whose statement seems to have such a 
mysterious power over the spiritual imagi- 
nation of the masses. How anything can 
be conceived or stated more repugnant to a 
healthy moral sense, I do not see. If my 
salvation is to depend on my acceptance of 
it, my whole nature must be changed from 
what it now is, and my standard of right and 
wrong entirely reversed. The substitution of 
one man's innocence for another man's guilt, 
or one man's righteousness for another's lack 
of righteousness, is, in every way it may be 
presented, unjust and immoral. We have 
only to apply this principle of substitution 
to any common relation of life to see its 
unfairness. Let us keep to the figure of 
the scales which, we are told, will finally 
weigh us. 



THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 227 

I have a little nephew only a few months 
older than my son. In the summer-time 
they come together, and there is a natural 
rivalry between them as to which weighs the 
more. What would you say to me, if, when I 
took my boy to be weighed, I should secretly 
put a five-pound weight into his pocket, to 
bring up his weight ? Or how would it do 
for me to stand on the platform with him, and 
let my weight be added to his ? And yet 
that is precisely what we are told Jesus does 
for Mr. Moody and as many as he may con- 
vert. Two men come up to be weighed, — 
one a convert of the Tabernacle, the other 
not ; both, we will suppose, are equally blame- 
worthy before the moral law ; but the con- 
vert will outweigh the other nevertheless. 
" How ? " " By having Jesus step in with 
him, and then how the weight will go up ! " 
says this revivalist. 

In such preaching as that I see no moral 
benefit to the community. 

Let the pulpit revise its doctrine. Let the 
preacher honor himself and his calling by 
being candid, true, moral both in life and 



228 THE PULPIT AND MORALS. 

teaching ; let him magnify his work by doing 
it, so that his acts, like those of the first 
apostles, may survive his sermons, and we 
will esteem them that labor among us highly, 
" for their works' sake." 



University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 



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Messrs. Roberts Brothers Publications. 

ATHEISM IN PHILOSOPHY, 

AND OTHER ESSAYS. 
By FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE, 

Author of " Reason in Religion," " Primeval World of Hebrew 
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sincere seeker after truth, who has studied atheism and pessimism as they are 
set forth by their ablest and most conscientious advocates, and whose long and 
vigorous life has given him a deep and wide knowledge of books and of human 
life. His gospel is not one of limitation and darkness, but of courage, godliness, 
and immortality."— Worcester Spy. 



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The Bible for Learners. 



By Dr. H. Oort, of Leyden, and Dr. I. Hooykaas, 
Pastor at Rotterdam. 

Translated from the Dutch by Rev. P. H. Wicksteed, «./ London. 

The Old Testament. 2 vols. i2mo. Price $4.00. 
The New Testament, i vol. i2mo. Price $1.00. 



" This work emanates from the Dutch school of theologians. 
Nowhere in Europe," said the lamented J. J. Tayler, " has theo- 
logical science assumed a bolder or more decisive tone [than in 
Holland] ; though always within the limits of profound reverence, 
and an unenfeebled attachment to the divine essence of the gos- 
pel. . . . We know of no work done here which gives such evi- 
dence of solid scholarship joined to a deep and strong religious 
spirit. The ' Bible for Young People ' should be the means to 
very many, both old and young, of a more satisfying idea of what 
Israel really was and did among the nations." 



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Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 

CHRISTIAN HISTORY 

IN ITS THREE GREAT PERIODS. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 



First Period. "EARLY CHRISTIANITY." - 

Topics: i. The Messiah and the Christ; 2. Saint Paul; 
3. Christian Thought of the Second Century; 4. The Mind 
of Paganism; 5. The Arian Controversy; 6. Saint Augus- 
tine; 7. Leo the Great; 8. Monasticism as a Moral Force; 

9. Christianity in the East ; 10. Conversion of the Barba- 
rians ; 11. The Holy Roman Empire; 12. The Christian 
Schools. 

Second Period. "THE MIDDLE AGE." — 
Topics: i. The Ecclesiastical System; 2. Feudal Society; 
3. The Work of Hildebrand ; 4. The Crusades ; 5. Chiv- 
alry ; 6. The Religious Orders ; 7. Heretics ; 8. Scholastic 
Theology; 9. Religious Art; 10. Dante; II. The Pagan 
Revival. 

Third Period. " MODERN PHASES." - Topics : 
1. The Protestant Reformation ; 2. The Catholic Reaction ; 
3. Calvinism ; 4. The Puritan Commonwealth ; 5. Port 
Royal ; 6. Passage from Dogma to Philosophy; 7. English 
Rationalism; 8. Infidelity in France ; 9. The German Critics; 

10. Speculative Theology ; II. The Reign of Law. 

Each volume contains a Chronological Outline of its Period, with a 
full Table of Contents and Index, and may be ordered separately. 

Volume I. ("Early Christianity") is, with a few additions, — the most 
important being a descriptive List of Authorities, —the same that was 
published in 1SS0, under the title, " Fragments of Christian History." 
2 volumes. \6mo. Cloth. Price, 31.25 per volume. 

Mr. Allen's writings, "Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 3 
vols., $1.75; " Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah,' 
31.50; "Our Liberal Movement in Theology chiefly as shown in Recollec- 
tions of the History of Unitarianism in New England," $1.25, may be had, 
the five volumes, for 35 -5°- 

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the publislurs, Roberts Bkotheks, Boston. 






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